
aassJ^KiOll 
Book_Ail_L^ 

no7 



? 



ff 



LONEWOOD CORNER 



iaarSv fif foprdarai, Hxrirfp ol apyol rrjv Sidvoiau 
elddaffiv fCTiaffdai ixp* favrwv, '6rav fx6voL -tropevuvTai. 



LONEWOOD CORNER 



A COUNTRYMAN'S HORIZONS 



BY, 

JOHN HALSHAM 

AUTHOR OF "iDLEHURST" 



Satlus est , . . otiosum esse quam nihil agere 



NEW YORK 
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 

31 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET 
1907 






n«7 



PRINTED BV 

WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED 

LONDON AND BECCLES 






NOTE 

The Author's thanks are due to the Editor 
of The Saturday Review for leave to embody- 
here the substance of five articles which 
have appeared in that Review. 



LONEWOOD CORNER 



INTRODUCTORY 

My DEAR Paterson, 

Ten years ago I addressed to you, and 
through you to what we call the reading public, a 
few pages by way of introduction to the country 
journal which I named " Idlehurst." Here is 
another book ready to go into the world ; and it 
seems fitting, as both you and I have maintained 
our fixity of place and of humours through so 
considerable a portion of our course, that I should 
mark our consistency in a fleeting scene by making 
you in the second book fulfil the same office which 
you did in the first. I have indeed moved my 
tabernacle a few geographical miles, to drive my 
stakes all the faster in the clay of the Weald ; and 
you, though you no longer look over the Heath to 
the great cauldron simmering under its fumes, yet 
tell me that Golder's Green is practically Hamp- 
stead still ; in all other conditions I think we may 
claim to have resisted very fairly Time's alteration. 

I B 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

And yet there is a large difference between the 
antecedents of the first book and of the last. 
" Idlehurst " grew together with an ease that seems 
almost astonishing now, in desultory fits and odd 
hours of summer out-of-doors ; there was, I sup- 
pose, a certain amount of matter, the accumulation 
of a good many years, undrawn-on and ready to 
run over on to paper by a sort of capillary 
attraction in the fingering of a pencil. With the 
second collection, though there was no doubt 
something of old material unexhausted, and some- 
thing of new has accrued in the interval, the vein 
never seemed to run with the unlaborious trickle 
of earlier days. The reason is perhaps not far to 
seek : the first papers were casual and irrespon- 
sible, taken up and left at the sole instance of 
humours and chances, with scarcely a thought of 
public suffrages till they had almost come to full 
shape. When an author has once spoken with the 
world, that early ease and carelessness can never 
come again ; the shield is suspended on the 
pavilion, or if you like the figure better, the shutters 
are down, and the adventurer is under the law of 
the comparative. By the public I mean here not 
the unknown vast into which an author pitches his 
voice, the void which, for any human echo that 
comes back to him, might be the primal chaos 
itself ; but the tangible few here and there in the 
profound — candid friends and friends of friends, 
strangers who turned into friends, one or two 

2 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

reviewers, material instead of vaguely kind, critics 
casual but pertinent, heard of at the third or 
fourth rebound — from whom some sort of personal 
answer has returned. It is these, I think, which 
an author — in the earlier stages of his career, at 
least — should have in mind ; more, perhaps, than 
some more customary censures. For myself, in 
presenting my new book, I take a good deal of 
pains to consider the criticism of the old, as it 
comes back to me from those points of solid mean- 
ing in the intangible vast. I note a consensus of 
feeling that there was no harm in the thing: a 
general attribution of a sedative, if not a soporific 
effect, acceptable in certain kinds of fatigue or 
convalescence, and sometimes serviceable as a 
nightcap ; of a desultoriness which made it suitable 
for reading piecemeal at odd times, together with 
a certain homogeneous quality which has made 
people — sometimes quite unlikely people, as I 
should have judged — capable of reading it through 
as much as a dozen times. These are charac- 
teristics, among those which it is proper to discuss, 
which I can admit at once ; a gift of mild-eyed 
melancholy, though I fail to observe it myself, I 
will not dispute against some very respectable 
critics. In reply to a few hints that there are here 
and there pedantic leanings to be discovered, and 
a too liberal sprinkling of quotations and tags in 
the dead languages, I would ask the anti-classical 
rebukers to skip the offending scraps, and believe 

3 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

that they are an old sort of Abracadabra spell, 
which, even if it does not conjure, as some old- 
fashioned people declare it does, is at least harm- 
less to robuster minds, and may be avoided without 
seriously dislocating the text. To ladies — if there 
be any still who are not learned — I make no 
apology ; I know how they appreciate the air of 
those light italics which relieve the solid page. 

It is critics with some such prepossessions as 
these that I should wish to please, and that I run 
the risk of disappointing, with my new collection. 
I believe that I am at least conscious of the various 
mishaps possible in the carrying out of the design ; 
I know the Nemesis which not infrequently attends 
upon continuations and sequels ; I recognise the 
chance that all the lighter spirit which originally 
worked to a perhaps half lucky result may have 
altogether evaporated in the repetition, the just- 
caught balance of humours may have passed into 
a weighty pose. I know the sad declensions 
unawares to disproportionate emphasis, to formula, 
to sentiment, to sermons. You, at least, will not 
accuse me of making light of the peculiar dis- 
advantages of middle age ; you will have heard 
me blame the unbent nerves, the hesitation about 
sticking the point of one's mind into the middle of 
sometimes twy-seeming truth ; I see that a man 
may accustom himself to the pleasures of the 
fallentis semita vitce till, like a rabbit in the 
poacher's wire, he hangs himself up through 

4 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

treading his one little track across the green 
meadows of the world. Other habits and states 
there are which hinder a free traffic in feelings and 
opinions ; such as the natural lowering of tempera- 
ture in one's enthusiasm, the temptation to love 
irony for its own sake, the position — in which I 
have been for some time pretty well rooted — that 
one's adversaries in various sorts of debate have 
ceased to count, while the main difficulties come 
from the upholders of one's own side. 

Against these discouragements I can set a 
tolerable array of gains. Ten years can do a 
good deal to condense the aqueous principle of 
sentiment into solid bottoming of knowledge ; in 
that space I find that humanity has supplied me 
with support and proof to my theories in the 
kindest possible way ; my dealings with books 
(more and more among the untainted witnesses 
of the old world) bring me continuous accessions 
of confidence and ratifications of lucky shots. 
Every day adds a touch to fill in the sketch-ideas 
of the prime ; early notions, shooting out in seem- 
ing-random right lines like the first growth of 
ice-crystals on a pond, are crossed and recrossed 
by others at all angles, and are presently meshed 
up to a practicable solidity. (The illustration has, 
no doubt, a suggestion of frigidity, but I leave it 
to your good sense.) There is clear gain in the 
middle-aged frame of mind which knows that 
*'il-y-a des pertes triomphantes a I'envy des 

5 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

victoires," which can let the press go by, and is 
content to serve with a clear-eyed courage that 
mistress who neither grants nor refuses anything, 
neither follows nor flies. And, lastly, there is gain 
in a detail of the domestic management of one's 
mind, the usage of reserve so that a man may 
keep open house, and let the world have the run 
of his hall and stairs, his picture-gallery or library, 
may admit accredited people even to a private 
parlour, yet keep the key of a room or so to 
himself, perhaps even have a little oratory in the 
heart of the house, unsuspected behind the secret 
door in the panelling. 

I have admitted that there may be dangers in 
the making of continuation or sequel-books ; but 
perhaps after all the present volume will be found 
to follow its predecessor at a safe distance. You 
will see that the ten years have shifted the scene 
and changed the persons. My walks are no more 
in Arnington ; and even if they were, I could not 
have drawn many of the old faces. The Rector, 
talking of having been too long on the ground, 
has gone away to a small living in Lincolnshire ; 
Alice is married in India ; Bob is working on a 
railway in Natal ; Margaret Fletcher is a nurse 
in the North ; Gervase French is in London, 
gone out of my ken. Others of the old company 
I sometimes see for a moment at street corners 
and over cottage gates when I make one of my 
rare visits to the old neighbourhood. Bish touches 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

his hat — the battered billycock of the past — from 
the wood-pile at Dogkennel, a little gceyer and 
more stooped than of yore, his face yet more 
melancholy-lined, and we exchange hollow senti- 
ments about the season and the crops ; Liza 
Packham I doubtfully perceive in the roundabout 
mother of six ; sometimes, at garden parties whose 
net has made a wider sweep, I come across Mrs. 
Kitty French or Mrs. Latimer, shadows of what 
I recollect. The General is dead, and Tomsett 
and Avery. Zero's successor already begins to 
blink at me with eyes a little misty in the sunlight, 
and I think to hunt the hedges with less furious 
zeal. Only old Lucy, faithful still, but beginning 
to fail a little, has followed to the new estate. 

There are natural differences in the general 
outlook upon our world then and now. The 
frenzy of haste and the destruction of natural 
beauty continue at much the old rate ; but I think 
with even less protest raised than before : we are 
so far poorer as a people that we cannot even 
think of affording ourselves an hour of clear leisure, 
or a piece of unspoiled country larger than a deer- 
park. The older graces of living continue to 
vanish in the natural progression ; the democratic 
standards of decency and civility in converse, the 
sense of amenity in being have mechanically de- 
clined, very much as it seemed probable they 
would ten years ago. But the general inundation 
which I sometimes apprehended shows no sign of 

7 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

breaking over us yet ; it still seems imminent, to 
certain kumours ; but the wave has now for some 
while hung above us in a nodding fixity, like the 
Red Sea in the old pictures of the passage of the 
Children of Israel. The blight of flat monotony 
still spreads upon our world, beginning from the 
schools ; but there are energies of resistance and 
sources of refreshment which I did not sufficiently 
allow for in my former estimate. I have come to 
the cautious conclusion that in this direction things 
may last our time. 

So much for variety in the matter of the book ; 
I think you will also find differences in the handling 
of it. I have proposed to take in a wider sweep of 
the horizon with my spy-glass ; the doings of the 
village and the fields have a more general reference 
to the needs of humanity and the portents of the 
time. You will find a good deal less about the 
garden, and something more about people and 
books than the former work contained. Altogether 
I think that those who, like you, have once or 
twice suggested a further chapter of " Idlehurst " 
will find here something more than a mere decant- 
ing of an old vintage under a new label. There 
have been fresh gatherings of grapes ; and if there 
were a few sour ones among them, in these pre- 
cocious days a jar sealed down for ten years has 
quite a claim to have digested its ranker humours. 
If all prove flat in the drinking, as may well be, 
— for the grower, who has a taste for the plump 

8 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

purples of his vine rows, is as a rule a poor judge 
of the bin — put it down to bad seasons, or unkindly 
soil, or the influence of baleful comets, and do not 
believe that the thinness is due to any dilution 
of the old lees, or squeezings of remainder grape- 
skins in the press. 

You see that I have been beforehand with a 
variety of exceptions, possible to be taken by you 
and the critics which you so kindly typify for me. 
If these defences fail, I retire to my impregnable 
hold ; the book is a parergon, as all literature of 
the tertiary rank and under should be. Say it is 
vapid, irritatingly cocksure, precious, strains after 
humour, meddles with matters above its range ; 
lay on and spare not ; you do not touch me. You 
know all the time that my business is with my 
turnips and onions, my Beurre pears, my pansies 
and long-tailed columbines. The book goes out 
by itself, a sub-product of the spade and hoe : you 
may remember my old opinion that all authors 
would be the better for an independence earned 
among saladings and worts. For critics, too, 
something of the back-bending discipline would 
often be very salutary ; it would, for one thing, 
show them the true place and possibilities of a 
parergon. There is, in the " Itinera Phantastica " 
of Carbonarius Secundus, a story of a hermit of 
Lower Egypt, who cultivated onions near his cell 
by the side of the Nile. He wrote a treatise on 
the bulb, wherein he praised God for all its virtues 

9 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

of taste and smell and comely proportions and 
healthful properties, and for all the meanings 
mystically contained in it — its spherical, tunicated 
form, its aroma, so mixed of bitter-sweet that as 
he said he contemplated it ^aKpvoev yeXacrag. He 
extended his thanksgiving to ninety-nine articles, 
and for all his pains was unable to excogitate a 
hundredth clause. One morning he woke to find 
that an angelic hand had filled in the hiatus in his 
papyrus : he had forgotten to give thanks for that 
onions were made with tails to hang them up by. 
There is a moral of uses here which I leave to 
your apprehension, though you may never have 
bunched your onions in September sun, nor found 
occasion to trouble your head to think what devices 
a man may find in after-works, at the second or 
the third remove. 



lo 



II 



January i. 
It is, perhaps, well for us to be taken up by the 
roots and transplanted two or three times in our 
lives, as certain shrubs in nursery-gardens with a 
view to their better standing, as gardeners say, 
the final shift. Though my last remove was not 
accomplished without some rending of the stiffened 
fibres, and I think that some part of me was left 
behind in the familiar ground, yet sooner than I 
could have fancied the wounds barked over, the 
roots began to stir in their new station, to burrow 
and lay hold round about them for the anchorage 
and sustenance which must be found if there is to 
be any more leaf or flower — fruit, shall I say ? — 
from the old stock, as the sap moves at the season. 
In the present case, the remove was not to any 
great distance, in terms of space. In no very long 
walks I still pass the old gate now and then, and 
sometimes stop a minute to look over it. I have 
not been inside it since my tenancy ended, 
though the house remains empty and the garden 
is fast going back to wildness. That is all done 
with and put away in its proper place. To revisit 

II 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

the borders I planted, the rooms I grew to, except 
in the immunity of dreams, those night-long 
summers whose magic air brings all our crude 
remembrances together to a mellow unity, would 
be too gross a confusion. If one must be a ghost, 
disembodied and sent adrift, this at least remains, 
to vow by Styx never to haunt and hang about 
the old domain. Five miles away from the land- 
mark fir-clump that for so many years set me my 
course for home, and still beckons sometimes in 
evening walks to the indocile mind, five miles away 
as the wood-dove flies, is the new quarter into 
which I begin to grow — a narrower close and a 
somewhat lowlier roof than the old, as befits the 
shrinkage, natural to the increase of days, in 
energy and in other material of life. I am again 
on the outskirts of a village : I still enjoy seclusion 
or society at my choice. Sheringham is not half 
so large a place as Arnington, and is some ten 
years behind it in its stage of growth. The 
invasion of consequential cottages and modest- 
simpering villas, which began to overpower the old 
rustic grace of Arnington's looks, has hardly 
reached the remoter settlement. Here are also 
larger remnants of the old life and ways, excre- 
scences which so far have escaped the jack-plane 
of Progress. Above all things the place owns the 
priceless gift of A Character, an idiosyncrasy 
of talents and humours, a proper twist in ways 
of seeing and doing, differences other than those 

12 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

by which its more progressive neighbours seem 
distinguishable — by the possession of a heavier 
rate, that is to say, of a less considerable Parish 
Council, of a more heatedly personal squabble 
over the drains. In due time the rising tide will 
no doubt overflow this higher ridge of the vanishing 
shore; but meanwhile here is some dozen years* 
respite from the crawling invasion — and a dozen 
years should suffice for a comfortable breathing- 
space, perhaps even for the achieving of projects 
of several kinds. The lesser circuit of my bound- 
aries leaves me rather more leisure than I once 
enjoyed. I find myself putting away my book 
and strolling down to the village of a morning in 
a way which not so long ago I should have called 
mere slacking. In the new order of things — four 
years still leaves it new to a slow-moulded tem- 
perament — a feeling of detachment which is an 
old failing grows stronger, a sense of walking 
about among my kind, speculant, aloof. I find 
myself, after the change in life that had run un- 
broken into the fourth lustrum, more than ever 
an onlooker ; I have no less interest in my neigh- 
bours' concerns, I hope, but I observe them more 
consciously from without. It is partly due to this 
contemplative humour, perhaps, that I often end 
my daily walks at the church, and by an estab- 
lished understanding with old Lewry the sexton, 
find my way through the dark tower-postern and 
up the rickety ladders to the belfry. There 

13 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

among the huge crooked timbers, bleached by 
centuries of wind and weather, with the bells, 
silent monsters, at rest in the pits of their cage 
beneath me, I lean on the edge of the trefoil 
window, and in a compendious bird's-eye view, 
consider the village spread out below. I have 
had, for as long as I can remember, a liking for 
belfries ; one of my earliest heroes was Moses 
Branch, the little surly man who kept spades and 
mattocks and certain ominous planking in a dark 
hole under the tower at Sandwell, and was master 
of the key of the winding stair, strewn with the jack- 
daws' litter, leading to the ringing-chamber and the 
giddy platform of the leads, whence one looked 
breathlessly between the battlements over the flat 
world, the dwarfed, slow-moving traffic of the 
roads, the works of men, to the lifted verge of the 
hills. Moses, I remember, dispensed the green 
grease from the bearings of the bell-trunnions, 
a sovereign remedy for the bad legs of the parish, 
whose virtue lay as much, no doubt, in an attributed 
sanctity as in its oxides. Here, as I clamber over 
the frames, the clotted oil drips from the brasses 
and soaks into the flooring, but no sexton's knife 
scrapes it now for the needs of the good women in 
the street. Our faith, when our legs are bad — and 
we are a much-afflicted race in that way — is nowa- 
days exercised on other, perhaps no less simple 
medicaments. 

From this pinnacle above the common levels 

14 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

of mankind, where the swifts shriek in an ecstasy 
of play as they whirl across the sun-baked southern 
face of the tower, and the jackdaws come and go 
upon their own devices with jerky inconsequence, 
I watch the life of the street, of the yards and 
gardens, the suburb fields, with my instinct of 
detached speculation at fullest play. The point 
of observation has its peculiar influence ; one is 
here at the very heart of the parish, the centre 
about which it has shaped itself for a thousand 
years. I am in the secrets of the clock which 
rules the republic down below ; the sudden stroke 
of the hour, which sets a hundred labourers in the 
fields to their dinners, or calls the children in to 
school, is notified to me by premonitory clicks 
and whirrings of the machine ; and visible tuggings 
of cranks and wires prepare me for the uproar of 
the halting chimes and the thunderous clang of 
the tenor, whose note, a scarcely heard vibration 
of melancholy sound, used at times to reach me on 
the south-west wind in the garden under the fir- 
clump at Idlehurst. The great bell, whose crown 
bears the legend Prais God. i6oi. still sounds 
the knell to call the tenth generation to their place 
where the headstones lean and weather, and the 
unmarked mounds sink to the level of the grassy 
plot below. The very masonry of the belfry has, 
I cannot help thinking, a sort of sonority, that 
answers the chance noises of the street — the clink 
of the smith's hammer or the rumble of the mill- 

15 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

waggons — with a peculiar retentiveness. I like to 
think that this is due to the ssecular vibration of 
the bells, a sympathy of matter acquired in the 
course of time. These ancient louvre-boards of 
split and hoary oak have, I assert, a timbre of their 
own, absorbed from the million rounds, backstroke 
and handstroke, that have sounded over them to 
the ears below — Sunday chimes, lulling slumbrous 
afternoons in harvest, or blown in gusty syncopa- 
tions through the roaring elms ; all the wedding 
treble-bob majors ; the melancholy changes for the 
old year, heard over frosty fields ; the muffled 
peals for the departed great ; the clash of the 
" firing " for Trafalgar or Waterloo. The tower 
has so long spoken to the street, and for the street, 
that one may well take that material sympathy 
for a probable opinion, at least. 

From the height the village lies spread like a 
map before me; the highroad, fringed with the 
irregular line of comely cottages and self-respecting 
houses which make up Sheringham Street, winds 
away past the gates of the Park, the great house 
half hidden in groves of oak and fir, across the 
wide stretches of heathy common lying to the 
south, towards the long wall of the Downs. The 
street itself, embowered in old polled limes that 
border the wide grass verges on either side, is still 
sufficiently rural. The line of the houses is broken 
by the purlieus of two farms, the grey and green 
squares of whose fields are interchanged with the 

i6 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

cottage-gardens and yards of the hamlet. There 
are but five or six houses of the better sort — all 
ancient, with tiled or timbered fronts, stone roofs, 
and red-brick towers of chimney-stacks — whose 
outward look alone means security and repose. 
The two inns, the Talbot and the Dolphin, and 
the little beershop, the Crocodile, hang their signs 
over the short stretch of brick pavement which 
marks the forum, the busy centre of the commune. 
Close underneath the church lies the Almshouse 
— our Hospital of Saint Mary and Saint John in 
Sheringham of the foundation of Ralphe Noyes ; 
its green quadrangle, the gaping mouths of its 
chimneys, its mossed red roofs, its bell-turret, its 
gardens, trim hedged and plotted out in little 
squares ; its wood-yard, its Warden's lodge, are 
all laid out, neat and fine as an architect's plan, 
before the observer's eyes. About the court and 
the gardens move the bent, slow-pacing figures of 
the almsmen, or sit motionless an hour together 
on the benches under the southern wall. At the 
hours of the Rule the turret-bell calls the com- 
moners to Chapel or to Hall ; and long after the 
parish clock has told the hour, a slumbrous note, 
like a bell in a dream, gives the little world its 
own time. Sometimes from his Lodge comes the 
Warden, spare, erect, abruptly moving, stopping a 
minute to speak to one of the bedesmen at the 
gate, and then with raised hand and quickened 
pace striding Into the greater world. He looks 

17 c 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

up at the church tower as he passes, to mark the 
time, and those piercing eyes beneath the bushy- 
grey brows, though a hundred feet below, seem 
as though they must espy me in my covert under 
the shingles of the spire. He makes no sign, but 
passes on to the street, bound on pastoral errands, 
which as locum tenens for the Vicar he has, during 
the last year, added to his charge at the Hospital. 
During an hour's watch from the belfry window 
on a fine forenoon you shall see almost every 
figure of our commonwealth. About twelve there 
is a sort of excursus of the gentry of the street. 
The Misses Walcot, the two old ladies from The 
Laurels, take their morning walk to the Post 
Office, punctual as the sun. Captain Prendergast 
fetches his newspaper, and if affairs be strenuous, 
unfurls it there and then, and reads as he makes 
quarter-deck turns up and down the pavement 
between the Dolphin and the Pond. From the 
Park gates, in dowdiest country things, to do 
her shopping, walks Lady Anne, whose ancient 
barouche and reverend greys were never known 
to appear before the hour of the afternoon drive. 
A dashing, yellow-wheeled dog-cart brings down 
from Frogswell Place Mrs. Sims-Bigg, one of our 
leaders of society and a personage in politics, to 
send off her telegrams and meet her trains. And 
now that he is home on leave, Harry Mansel, with 
his pipe and his dachshund, saunters down to look 
at his mare at the Talbot stables, attaching himself 

i8 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

impartially to all he meets, Lady Anne or the 
ancient sisters of The Laurels, and visibly welcome 
to all. 

At eleven o'clock the proletariat drifts from the 
hod or the hoe to its morning beer ; the forge is 
silent, the swish of the cross-cut ceases at the saw- 
pit. There you may see, making towards the 
Dolphin, Tom Prevett, our demagogue, a terrible 
Radical yet a very honest man, surly, pugnacious, 
entirely trustworthy, a tremendous worker, putting 
through, with a touch of the heroic age, day by 
day, year in year out, the work of three men of 
this degenerate time. There is Jack Miles with 
his inseparable lurcher at heel, the satyr-faced old 
tatterdemallion whose career of oddly mixed good 
and bad ends in unredeemed loafing about the 
Dolphin yard and the slow soak of body and soul 
in " twopenny." There is Tom Gates and a dozen 
like him, " only labourers," chance workers at any 
job that barely taxes hand or head : thriftless, 
aimless, uncontrolled, drunk or starved by the 
chance of a fortnight's wages ; an interesting class, 
a product — a portent, some will have it — entirely 
of our own making. There, too, not yet grown 
superior to the forenoon habit of his youth, is 
Mr. Alpheus Myram, their master — "employer," 
the wise it call — our builder, contractor and under- 
taker, a District Councillor and the people's warden, 
a man of views, who has dreams of a future 
for Sheringham and bides his time for the fair 

19 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

opportunities of local government on the proper 
scale, when we shall be ripe for kerbed concrete 
pavements and a drainage-scheme — oh noun of 
sagest meaning ! There are other workers who 
have no eleven o'clock recess, but are to be seen 
punctual to their hours the year round ; old Abram 
Reed the walking postman, who has done his 
eighteen miles a day for twenty-seven years, 
shuffles down the road with his wallet and sack, 
to meet at the Crossways the higher official lately 
promoted to a cart and horse. Elihu Dean the 
carrier brings his van out of the Talbot yard and 
begins to collect his weekly chaos of parcels and 
errands for the county town, all sorted in that 
black bullet-head of his without so much help as a 
pencil-tick ; Alf Tulley mounts the box of the 
conveyance which calls itself totidem literiSy " The 
Sheringham Buss," a hearse-like wagonette 
with a top to it for bad weather, and whistling to 
advertise the street, rouses his horses to a walk 
and departs for the railway station and the great 
world, four sound miles away. The doctor comes 
from the surgery, takes the reins and slashes the 
kicking mare whose play has been entertaining 
the street, and spins away on his twenty-mile 
round of cases, the rich variety of the country 
practitioner, amputation of a finger caught in a 
chaff-cutter, midwifery, measles, a typhoid outbreak 
at Manvil's Green, the end of one cancer case, and 
the diagnosis of another. The Warden, in his 

20 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

pastoral capacity, comes back from sick-visiting in 
Jubilee Cottages, making slow progress up the 
street with many tacks and crossings, pursuing 
and pursued, hailing Mr. Churchwarden Myram 
from the Dolphin steps, or held for five minutes 
while Widow Roser, curtseying like a clock-work 
toy, pours out her interminable complaints and 
needs. Tomkins the constable comes from the 
cottage where the inscription COUNTY POLICE 
hides among vine-leaves and monthly roses ; an 
officer stout and bucolic of aspect, but very effectual 
for good, in a personal and paternal way not 
perhaps altogether contemplated by the regula- 
tions. No sort of justice has as yet been done 
to the village policeman ; the difficulties of his 
position, the importance of his personal character, 
and his influence, preventive and monitory, in all 
sorts of indirect ways, are still quite insufficiently 
recognised. 

Now all these characters, be it observed, belong 
to the village itself — a compact and well-defined 
area in the midst of the real solitudes. Save on a 
market-day, it is rarely that the genuine rustic, 
the unmistakable weathered features and uncouth 
figure, to say nothing of the long leggings, the 
green cotton umbrella, the round frock, are seen in 
Sheringham Street. The division between town 
and country holds even here : in its degree, the 
difference is perhaps as sharply marked as in any 
other region. The two races seldom mix ; the 

21 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

older breed keeps apart, but is quietly disappearing 
before the new. We no longer even see the sun- 
bonnet of old Mrs. Gaston, which for a time defied 
the modern hats of her peers in the street ; after 
six months* sojourn with her daughter in Jubilee 
Cottages, she went back to live by herself at 
Beggar's Bush, a mile from the nearest house. 
She could not afford to live down in Sheringham 
Street, she said ; " you had to pay for everything 
you had there ; " there was no windfall fuel after 
a gale, no chance rabbit from the keeper, no eggs 
from the half-dozen hens that foraged for them- 
selves on the roadsides, no apples from the old 
untended trees. Good reasons for going back to 
the wild, no doubt ; yet one guesses at other 
causes, to the full as cogent, if not quite so easy 
to put into words. The magnetic attraction which 
produces the Rural Exodus, as the tag-chewers 
call it, has its repellent pole, and helps to widen 
the gulf between old and new both ways. And 
that exodus is not only towards the large towns : 
there is a drift even into such a centre as our 
village, which takes a man from the life of the 
fields as completely and irrevocably as though it 
had stranded him in the Tower Hamlets. There 
is one way, however, in which our town and 
country elements mix effectually enough. Morn- 
ing and afternoon there goes up or down the street 
the straggling procession to school and home 
again. Loitering as only school-children can 

22 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

loiter, loaded with baskets, ancient umbrellas, 
mother's marketings, dragging with them babies 
committed to their charge, the rising race covers 
its two, three, or four miles a day of field-path 
across the swampy plough, of quagmire lane, of 
blinding highroad dust, as chance and the seasons 
provide, to and from the factory of minds, that 
they may sit long hours on benches under blank 
walls, droning in listless chorus half the morning, 
and eat their bread-and-dripping dinner and play 
their marbles in the street. And we, ingenuous 
creatures that we are, who think that these matters 
can be managed by the sort of brains adapted for 
Post Offices and Boards of Works ; who, when we 
find our codes and methods have been entirely 
wrong for twenty years, allow ourselves to be 
dashed by no base misgivings about our primordial 
sapience, but rescind and remodel with yet more 
perfect certainty for the elimination of one more 
mistake ; we, I say, are justified in scratching our 
heads, as I observe we begin to do, and wondering 
why the carefully selected syllabus of rudiments 
which the children are to learn and to be pre- 
vented from learning, should for once result in the 
precise character it was calculated to form. 

I observe that my meditations in the belfry 
have a way of ending in criticism of fundamentals. 
Perhaps the sense of elevation here, the looking 
down — as one does from some other altitudes — on 
the heads of one's fellows in dwarfed perspective, 

2Z 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

encourages the censorial twist of mind. It be- 
comes time to descend and mix again on the 
levels with one's kind ; and presently, when the 
last of the red-cloaked or long-legginged little 
school-people have straggled up the street and 
taken the country way home again by stile or 
lane, I follow their track to the upland paths and 
the wooded hill, to the beloved solitude and the 
secret guarded in the silence of the waste fields. 



24 



Ill 



January 12. 
During the past year I have a good deal im- 
proved my acquaintance with my neighbours, the 
Miss Walcots. This is mainly due to the arrival 
at The Laurels of Mary Enderby, a friend of the 
family in the third generation, on a visit which, the 
wise heads of the village declare, will last as long as 
the old ladies need any looking after. Mary is one 
of those plain, healthy women who seem to have 
been about forty as long as one can remember, 
towers of strength in all manner of domestic 
alarms, whose qualities of a certain useful hard- 
heartedness and a complete lack of nerves are 
constantly in request for the propping up and 
bucklering of more impressionable people. She 
happens to be a very distant cousin of mine, some- 
where at the farthest stretch of kin ; but the fibre 
of the race is tough and elastic, and traditionally 
responsive to such strains, and we both acknow- 
ledge our duty to the family tree. Now and then 
I go to tea at The Laurels, and sometimes Mary 
comes up the hill for strawberries or cucumbers or 
other seasonable foison, and sometimes we meet in 

25 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

the village on marketing mornings and walk a 
length or two of the pavement together. And so 
I come to know the ladies of The Laurels better 
than I had done for a long time. Of course I 
knew the sisters by sight well enough, one tall and 
something masculine, very old indeed, with that 
curious contrast of strongly marked features and 
vacant expression sometimes to be seen in aged 
faces, and with a manner whose unremitting 
courtesy was a little awful ; the other, white-haired, 
and with the colour still clear in the wrinkled 
cheek, beautiful not only with the proper beauty of 
old age, but with a kind of afterglow of early light, 
slight, still graceful in carriage, shy, apt at times to 
be a little fluttered in manner. I knew all the 
oddities of character and methods of the pair 
which the village looks upon with a sort of pro- 
prietary amusement not far from pride ; the daily 
walk to the post-office for letters, when Miss 
Louisa, in the lielief that she goes too fast for 
Miss Fanny, paces the pavement some three yards 
in front of her sister, neither more nor less in their 
half-mile's excursion ; I had observed the quaint 
habiliments, the wardrobe of an older day, upon 
which Miss Louisa's taste engrafts astonishing 
embellishments in the way of bows and ribbons ; 
I knew the ladies' habit of taking the air on fine 
evenings between June and September under the 
clipped peacocks of the yew hedge in their garden 
(a little plot which is understood to possess a 

26 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

peculiarly salubrious climate, not shared by any of 
the other back gardens on that side of the street), 
until at a fixed moment of the clock the damps 
begin to rise, they retire, and the house is locked 
and shuttered for the night. I have found them 
doing their marketing at Peskett's, the general 
shop, while Mr. Peskett matched their ribbon or 
weighed out their groceries with a fine deference 
not always shown to far more considerable cus- 
tomers. I have heard old Hobden, the butcher- 
greengrocer, recognising the survivors of an older 
race, relapse into a dialect almost forgotten in the 
village, and in the broader accent of the country 
forty years ago, commend to their notice " a proper 
mess o* peas ; dey's * Early Sunrise ' from my own 
gar'n, ladies," or " a middlin' nice parcel of Iron 
pears what I've had off dat Ditchling party as 
you'll rec'lect." Something of the life within doors 
at The Laurels is also public property ; one 
admires to hear of the rules of the household, the 
inexorable early hours which ignore the seasons, 
the stringent economy which counts the knobs of 
coal, and banishes cold with half-an-hour's turning 
of the mangle, if April make one of its bitter 
returns after the almanack date for the last parlour 
fire. Such characteristics as these I have long 
known and honoured as distinctions which help to 
give our village its mark of outstanding personality 
amid the grey monotony steadily spreading over 
the lower levels hereabouts. My closer acquaintance 

27 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

with the garden-walk and the parlour at The 
Laurels since Mary Enderby's arrival has filled in 
for me the outline of well-marked character mainly, 
but not wholly, in the way I had surmised. There 
is, I find, at least one very solid ground of agree- 
ment between the sisters, in the religion of putting 
by all that can be spared from the slender accounts 
in order that they may do their duty to the family 
estate, and that a few hundreds the more may go 
to swell the half-million or so of the head of the 
house, a sporting Yorkshire squire whom they have 
never seen. On most other subjects there is room 
for difference. "They manage to fratch a little 
now and then," says Mary Enderby, herself a 
Yorkshirewoman. Miss Louisa was always the 
clever one of the family, the manager, the fighter 
when need was. She upholds an ancient standard 
of propriety which the village admires, but scarcely 
emulates. Miss Fanny is altogether of gentler 
mould ; her face, as I have said, is beautiful, spite 
of worn eyes and fallen mouth ; at times one sees 
in it something more than beauty in the customary 
sense — a softening of expression as towards entire 
rest, the tenderness which sometimes comes to 
people who have not been fortunate, yet have kept 
their thoughts kind. The elder sister's features, as 
far as I have seen, are set and fixed — a mask 
without the light of eyes. 

There is no doubt that Miss Louisa was always 
the clever one. Miss Fanny was, I should judge, 

28 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

never of too accurate memory or consequent 
reason, and she has had to give way all her life to 
the superior mind. She has not yet wholly learned 
to recognise her place, and still contends for her 
poor tumbled recollections and loose-ended argu- 
ments ; but perhaps more from long habit than 
from any thought of ever having her own way. 
It may be that Miss Louisa's rigid accuracy is, 
after all, a kind of prop or stay against which Miss 
Fanny has leaned ever since school-days, and 
tliat if by any chance the prop were to give way, 
the infallible head be proved for once irrefragably 
wrong, the result might be disastrous. We talk, 
says Mary Enderby, of second childhood ; but 
some folk have but one. The sisters have scarcely 
altered that standing and regard towards each 
other which their difference of four or five summers 
gave them when they left the school-room seventy 
years ago. 

I pay calls at The Laurels much oftener than I 
should have ventured to do before the coming of 
Mary Enderby : the breach that was made in the 
walls to admit her has never been fully closed up 
against the world again. One drenched evening 
of late I found the ladies by the parlour fire, a 
cheerful blaze which had been made, I understood, 
for the benefit of the chair-covers and the books, 
and so could be enjoyed with a tolerable con- 
science. As summer wanes, the taking of the air 
under the yew hedge in the garden is replaced by 

29 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

a long hour in the parlour before it is dark enough 
to condone the lighting of candles and the settling 
down to the evening's employ. As winter draws 
on, and the fire wastes the counted billets quicker 
and quicker, I understand that the grand economy 
of bedtime is advanced more and more upon the 
silent hours in which Miss Fanny dozes over her 
book and Miss Louisa knits without a pause. To 
Mary I imagine that this early retirement is her 
opening day ; when she has seen the sisters safely 
upstairs, she makes her own world for a little, 
writes her letters, fetches down her books, or flings 
out for trudging walks about the village lanes. 
She does not seem to make many new friends in 
the place, beyond the Warden at the Almshouse 
and his niece Molly Crofts when she is staying 
here ; and I think she is glad, in a way, to see me 
at reasonable intervals, and to talk out of our 
common stock of memories and traditions. She 
has told me that Miss Louisa seems to fail a little 
of late : once or twice there has been some strange 
fumbling in her recollections, when Miss Fanny 
might have carried her point in the debate if she 
had not been stricken with sudden doubts and 
remorse at the other's unwonted hesitation, and 
tried in a half-frightened way to prove that she 
herself must have been wrong all the time. 

My last visit interrupted a difference of opinion 
about the wages of a certain dairymaid at the 
old home, fifty-something years ago. After the 

30 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

exchange of our accustomed sentiments upon the 
season and the village chronicle, the argument 
was resumed, and Miss Louisa producing from a 
marvellously orderly bureau several bundles of old 
housekeeping books, proved conclusively that at 
the time when poor brother John died in the 
trenches before Sebastopol, and the legacy enabled 
the household to enlarge its borders, Bessy Chat- 
field had come to Wallcroft with no character to 
speak of, and six pounds a year in wages. There 
was no sign of failure in the way Miss Louisa 
conducted her case, nor in the lesson which, as she 
tied up the account books with their strips of list 
and put them back in the drawer, she read to her 
sister on the virtues of exactitude and a methodical 
mind. Miss Fanny took the rebuke almost as a 
child at lessons might have done, her hands clasped 
nervously upon her book, and her head with its 
little tremulous motion stooping over them. My 
cousin had shown signs of restiveness during Miss 
Louisa's lecture, and presently pushed back her 
chair with unnecessary energy, upsetting a work- 
box on the table, and giving utterance to that 
emphatic Tck which on a lady's lips has all the 
virtues of an oath. After the diversion caused by 
hunting for cotton-reels in far corners of the 
parlour, I took my leave, receiving the formal 
curtseys and the wishes for a pleasant journey and 
salubrious repose with which The Laurels speeds its 
guests. Mary came to the door with me ; the rain had 

31 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

cleared and it was a fine light evening ; but though 
she stood a moment on the step and looked abroad, 
I doubt if she observed the mild dusk or the young 
moon. Her face bore a thinking frown, with a 
rather grim lifting of the lip, an expression which 
would have become Nemesis about to foreclose, and 
certainly had a look of Miss Louisa. She held out 
her hand with an abrupt good night, and went 
back to her charges ; and on my way home I 
thought of times when I have seen her face reflect 
rather Miss Fanny's softened melancholy, and 
mused as I went on two sorts of destiny, and 
guessed at some prophylactic root of the Moly 
tribe which found in early days may preserve one's 
features in the pleasanter cast of expression when 
they have grown too set and stiff to change. 



32 



IV 



February 2. 

It is at this time of year that one comes to under- 
stand the fundamental charm of the country, 
seeing it in its bare elements, without the additions 
of spring or summer ; here, rure vero barbaroquBy 
the wonted walks about the fields show what 
power lies in a keen moist wind, a muffled silence 
of the woods, a grey-blue distance fading into 
formless mists — a power of unity, of resting force, 
of fine searching air and even breadth of light 
which makes the thought of streets every whit as 
abhorrent as it is under April hedge-sides. The 
mind's contrast of this clear freshness with the 
sounds and smells of town is all the more vivid 
for the imagination of certain town-folk foundered 
in these drenched wood-paths, halting with a scared 
concern for their boots in the hollows where the 
drifted leaves half bridge over and half conceal 
the pits of water among the churned-up clay, in 
the paths where not so long ago they disported 
themselves, in the lightest of shoe-leather, with all 
the airs of holiday ownership. It is an easy 
digression, as one pauses for a balanced stride 

33 D 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

across some wider puddle in Plash Lane, careful 
of the take-off on the poached edge, to think how 
this usurpation of footpaths summer-dry, paying 
no footing in November mud or February rime, 
figures the common position of the town intellect 
towards country affairs. The mind which observes 
our rural physiology and prescribes for its com- 
plaints is by a curious necessity the mind which 
makes expeditions indeed into the wilderness, but 
has its home in the world of clubs and cabs, 
among the fogs and the restaurant-fumes and the 
eternal ground-bass of the traffic. Such intellect 
comes down to the country with its capacious 
butterfly-net and its irresistible geological hammer ; 
it collects its specimens and returns to its own 
place ; and presently to us, wading dimly about 
our Plash Lanes in our winter solitude, arrive some 
of the results of the expedition — new laws and 
codes and economics, studies of land and labour, 
novels of rustic life — which we acknowledge with 
respectful wonder as to how it is done. It is 
clever beyond words. Suppose that I, whose 
centre is my cabbage-plot and my radius Plash 
Lane, on the strength of certain visits to town 
were to draw up regulations for the housing of the 
poor in Wandsworth, or to write a romance whose 
chapters careered through Park Lane, Capel Court, 
St. Stephen's and the Ghetto, I doubt whether I 
could manage to display a grasp of facts or secure 
a truth of presentment which would appear at all 

34 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

magisterial to the critics dwelling within that 
radius of four miles. And so, with a rebellious 
fling of the moral sense towards an ideal of com- 
pensatory advantages, one sometimes feels that 
the solitude traversed, the cold-driving rain and 
the quagmire road taken on their naked merits, the 
mental dialect of the countryside learned for 
twenty years without a holiday, ought to have 
some make-weight gift — intimacy, one pretends to 
one's self, some small power of seeing the inside of 
things, exemption from the subtle blight which 
falls upon the amateur. But this is not to be 
pressed closely ; there is a proper Nemesis for 
such aspirations ; even that brief excursion into 
speculative morality may suffice to land one over- 
shoes, where all the reluctant tracks converge 
perforce at the stile into one desperate slough. 

Plash Lane ends at Burntoak Farm ; and when 
I come this way, I usually face the struggle 
through the last and deepest morass of the occu- 
pation-road and the yard, wipe my boots, after a 
preliminary purgation on the grass-tufts at the 
gate, on the birch-broom cleaner at the side of 
the porch, and pay a visit to the mistress of the 
farm. 

It is generally allowed that Mrs. Ventom is a 
remarkable woman. She manages a large farm, 
as farms go hereabouts, incomparably better than 
most of the neighbouring farmers manage theirs, 
^nd her talent for business is looked up to with 

35 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

a respect not far from awe. She has been a 
Guardian for a good many years ; and there are 
those who say that she can do what she likes with 
the Board. Her private activities amongst the 
labourers and cottage-folk about her own holding 
are, in method and result, quite unlike the usual 
endeavours of our Ladies Bountiful. But beyond 
all this, there are personal qualities which make it 
worth Plash Lane twice over to take the settle by 
the down-fire, when it is neither churning-day nor 
Board-day, and poach an hour's talk from a winter 
afternoon. 

No one would think Mrs. Ventom to be sixty- 
five who did not remember that it is seventeen 
years since she took up the farm single-handed at 
her husband's death, and knew that the pair were 
middle-aged when they first came to Burntoak 
from the other side of the county. The widow is 
handsome, in a spare, strenuous way ; has the least 
touch of grey in hair as smooth and brown as a 
thrush's wing ; the expression of her face, given 
mainly by almost the clearest pair of eyes I have 
ever seen, is one of reserved strength, wise with 
the wisdom that is learned and taught. She is apt 
to be critical, with a humour of drolling a little on 
the matter in hand, with occasional indulgence to 
motions of much-loved fence, bearing ever so little 
on the foible of the opponent. The expression 
which suits her best is perhaps one that has 
grown upon her of late years, a look of thinking 

36 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

recollection, grave and wise, almost tender at times. 
Her manners are of that kind which people inex- 
perienced in a lapsed world sometimes attribute 
to duchesses. Her father was bailiff on a historic 
estate ; and a youth spent among great people — 
people who were great some forty years ago — with 
the " keeping of one's place " as a religious principle 
to counterbalance any of the common penalties of 
familiarity, seems capable of producing a notable 
sort of character — a race of stately housekeepers 
and grave dependents, of which Elia's Grand- 
mother Field is the type, and to which our Mrs. 
Ventom, whether talking round the Guardians 
or standing over her poultry in the Square on 
Tisfield market-day, or receiving his lordship at 
a shooting-lunch at the farm, without question 
belongs. 

She rules her work-people with a benevolent 
tyranny, kind but very consistently just, of the 
sort to which, if the ingredients be but evenly 
mixed, the rustic mind almost always responds 
generously, going back, it may be, to inherited 
traditions of bond-service, perhaps to conditions 
more fundamental still. The last time I was at 
Burntoak, she was considering the fate of Tom 
Gates, an odd-job man, excellent when sober for 
heavy haulage, for standing up to the knees in 
water through a winter's day at cleaning ditches, 
for all sorts of works where the brain can go to 
sleep comfortably. As Tom is very often drunk, 

17 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

and when drunk is a mere destructive beast, he 
would have been turned off the farm long ago, but 
for the usual complication of a wife and family. 
We have in the village plenty of working men of 
his sort, strong enough in body, till the incessant 
swilling does its work, too dull-witted to reach 
even the lowest form of skilled labour; on the 
whole perhaps not quite so intelligent as, certainly 
far less profitable to the country than a well- 
behaved cart-horse. Tom, owing to his particular 
weakness, suffers (in common with not a few 
others) from inability to go up ladders, and is thus 
debarred from the several careers connected with 
hods and scaffolding. He is meant for drains and 
ditches, for the roughest navvy-work with pick and 
shovel ; and at this his wages, if not interrupted 
by controllable accidents, taken the year round, 
with allowance made for average out-of-work 
intervals, would easily suffice to keep him and his 
family comfortably and to leave something over 
for the club or the savings bank. As it stands, 
he hands over to his wife, out of his fifteen shillings 
a week, seven, five, nothing, according to the 
liberality of his humour ; the balance goes, almost 
intact, into the till of the Dolphin and the Croco- 
dile. The first frosty week in the winter which 
stops ground-work means absolute starvation in 
the Gates' cottage ; but, as Tom is quite aware, 
there is a special Providence ready to interfere at 
such a pass. This way of life, with an occasional 

38 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

domestic broil or a bit of a fight in the street on 
a Saturday night, would hardly serve to distinguish 
Tom amongst a dozen of his mates ; he has other 
characteristics, such as the keeping of a lurcher, 
a faithful beast that risks the keeper's barrels on 
Sunday mornings to get his master the casual 
rabbit ; his language has caused the neighbours 
in a not too fastidious row to shut their windows 
during the dog-days ; he has been in jail twice for 
assaults. Naturally, such a workman does not 
stay very long at one job ; a day lost while the 
Saturday booze is being slept off, an abusive out- 
break at some fault found in his work, and Tom 
is on the street again. He has been doing some 
draining at Burntoak and has taken the oppor- 
tunity to poach the adjoining coverts during the 
dinner-hour; and Mrs. Ventom holds her hand, 
Justice brought up in her career, musing grimly 
on the customary complication of the hungry 
children and the tight-lipped wife in Jubilee 
Cottages. 

It is a nice question ; because, of course, every 
charitable penny which goes to pay the old score 
at the baker's, sets free another for the Crocodile 
till. The thick-witted brute perfectly appreciates 
the system of lady-visitors, their " tickets " and 
soup-kitchen, which enable him to lurch into the 
steaming bar night after night with a clear con- 
science. And certainly the anaemic wife and the 
five miserable children and the new baby must not 

39 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

be left without a crust or a stick of firing in the 
house ; impressionable people, discovering actual 
emptiness every way, have even ordered in bones 
for soup and a half-hundred of coal. It is a very 
nice question indeed, and one that ancient famili- 
arity seems to bring us no nearer solving. There 
are the usual expedients ; impounding the black- 
guard's wages, persuading the wife to throw herself 
on the parish and get her husband summoned, or 
to apply for a separation. Mrs. Ventom has tried 
these and more in her time ; but what in the world 
is to be done when there is a capital traitor in the 
camp, when Mrs. Tom, an apron-corner to her face 
to conceal the traces of a black eye, declares she 
wishes she may be in her grave before she'll hear 
any one say a word against her man, or lift a finger 
to break up that happy home, and so slams the 
door on the black hearth and the empty cupboard, 
and leaves us to work out the problem for ourselves ? 
It is not often that the mistress of the farm allows 
herself to look beyond the corners of the matter 
in hand ; but the present case being apparently 
insoluble in practice, she for once indulges her 
imagination so far as to sketch out a fancy picture 
of a reformed local government which would make 
the hopeless nuisance a useful asset to the nation. 
There should be buildings and fields, she thinks, in 
every parish, something between a workhouse, a 
prison, and a lunatic asylum, where Tom Gates 
and his kind should be kept out of mischief and 

40 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

made useful, without a penny of wages, fed and 
kept plainly and healthily, and put out to work in 
gangs under an overseer. 

" And punished if they broke out or turned sulky, 
Mrs. Ventom ? " 

" To be sure ! They should be well whipped if 
they misbehaved. Some would have to be chained 
up, as a rule." 

"And would you allow them to marry?" I 
inquire. 

"Well, some of them might ; the best ones. Of 
course," she goes on, following up with some 
relish, I think, the deviations of her unwonted ex- 
cursion amongst the foundations of society ; " of 
course there are worthless women, as well as men, 
and we should have to have places for them too. 
And it wouldn't be only for the working classes ; 
oh no ! there'd be room for ever so many others," 
she goes on, in a meditative tone charged with 
occurring instance. 

" And," I suggest, " I suppose after a certain 
record of good behaviour a man might get his 
discharge, and his full rights again ? " 

" Of course, if But the sort of men I was 

thinking of would generally stay there for good. 
And oh, the mercy it would be to the country and 
to all the decent people ! " 

" But think, Mrs. Ventom ! " I interpose, gravely. 
" It would be nothing better than slavery. The 
Greeks and Romans had just such a state of things 

41 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

— workhouses or ergastula, chained gangs, whips — 
they gave them some chances of liberty too ; are 
we to go back to the dark ages of Plato and ? " 

"We needn't trouble our heads about those 
days," says the philosopher, coming back from 
theory to life, as the maid announces that Micah 
wants to speak to her about his wages, and please 
what's to be done about the fence the bullocks 
broke in the middle meadow ? 

"Their liberty's safe enough nowadays. No 
one'U ever touch their right to get drunk every week 
and starve their families, and scamp their work, and 
help to ruin the whole country." 

" I imagine," I said, " that the calamitous Tom 
has a voice in his country's counsels ? " 

" Of course he has ! We have to thank j/^?/ for 
that ! " 

" Us ? Who ? " I demand. 

"Why, you gentlemen who arrange all these 
things in your clubs and committees, and take care 
that a brute like Tom Gates shall have his precious 
say in taxing and governing me^ 

" But I don't belong to a single committee, and 
I don't go to my club three times in a year, and I 
didn't even vote at the last election. And I am 
really in favour of female suffrage — with certain 
qualifications " 

" No, thank you ! " says Mrs. Ventom, as she sees 
me out of the porch, and I prepare to plunge into 
the abysses of the yard. " No, thank you ! Keep 

42 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

your own responsibilities to yourselves. At least 
I can thank goodness that I haven't a hand in all 
the stupid mess we have to live amongst." 

I had picked my way to an outcrop of the native 
sand-rock, which made a sort of island in the yard ; 
and at this speech I looked back, with something 
in the look, I suppose, which applied the words to 
the brown swamp about me. At any rate, Mrs. 
Ventom took it so, for she laughed and shook her 
head. 

"No, I'm not responsible for the yard either. 
That's the agent ; he promised me the stone to 
mend it with last year, and perhaps in another six 
months I shall get it. I've written half a dozen 
times. . . ," 

" If you were to see him, Mrs. Ventom," I suggest, 

"Ah," she replies, "if I had him in my own 
kitchen ! But do you think I've got the time to 
go up and find him in London ? A big estate 
may be managed that way, but not a small farm, 
if I know anything about it." 

" And plenty more besides small farms," said I, 
as I latched the gate and struck out into the road 
again. 



43 



February 14. 
I MADE a long round to-day by Beggar's Bush 
and Nyman's Corner, and came back through the 
village as the light began to fail. We had a week 
of dark weather, with a restless peevish wind just 
on the wrong side of west, which would not let one 
be ; but yesterday there were signs of something 
better behind it, and when about sunset next day 
the air fell suddenly to a dead calm, there was 
beyond any doubt the first touch of spring. Your 
cockney, who must have spring's coming burned 
into him by a glaring drought of May, would have 
hardly noticed one of the fine indications : the 
breath of the wintered meadow-grass coming 
across the smell of the dew on the dry road, or of 
the fresh-turned mould in cottage gardens ; a 
subtle change since yesterday in the misty screen 
of the Park elms ; the new meaning in the evening 
chorus of thrush and blackbird. There was a stir 
of spring in the street too ; people were sauntering 
or talking at cottage doors, oblivious of the breath 
of heaven ; there was a general sense of content 
and expansion of the soul, partly referable, no 

44 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

doubt, to sensible promises of good times coming, 
when fuel shall scarcely matter, when there shall 
be full work at the shop and the yard, and the 
baker's score shall be no more a burden : but 
mainly, I think, unconscious ; as much a matter 
of instinct and as little of calculation as the new 
richness in the concert of the birds. Every 
creature responds to the spirit in the air ; Ben 
the higgler's old pony hangs his head over the 
gate in drowsy ease ; the black column strag- 
gling home to the Park rookery across the rose 
and grey of the afterglow makes a mellower 
and a less solicitous uproar than of late; the 
school-children on their way home fill the street 
with livelier noise which the mild influence of the 
hour almost persuades me to think a less strident 
cacophony than on other eves. 

As I reached the top of the village the dusk 
began to take a ruddy flush from the low red in 
the west ; it was no direct light aloft on roof or 
gables, but a pervading rosy air, a suffusion that 
transformed the whole street, the church steeple, 
the timbered houses, the dark mould of garden 
plots with the snowdrops under the box-bushes, 
the faces at doors, the very cobble stones under 
one's feet. It was one of those times when a 
man slackens his pace as he goes, and takes deeper 
breaths, with a half meaning of making the most 
of a blest hour. The light was of that kind which 
pyts the very best construction upon the human 

45 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

faces it illuminates ; and when by the churchyard 
gate I met Mary Enderby coming across towards 
the Almshouse, I began to myself a handsome 
apology for having in times past considered 
" strong-featured " a sufficient tribute to her 
looks. I could have wished to look into the 
rights of such a transformation ; but my cousin 
would not stop to talk, because she was on her 
way to the Lodge. Molly Crofts had arrived that 
afternoon, and she wanted to catch her before 
dinner. She turned in to the Almshouse entry, 
and I went on up the street with a feeling that 
the bland Saturnian promise of the twilight was 
mainly accounted for. The coming of Miss Molly 
always seems, in a quite disproportionate way, 
to tune us up, to quicken, so to say, the tempo 
of our accustomed measures. I know that the 
Warden consciously heaves off a full ten years 
of his age, and sometimes a good deal more, when 
Molly is with him. Here is Mary Enderby over 
at the Lodge without loss of time, hardly stopping 
to speak to one — it was not alone that rose- 
twilight which so improved her looks. Do I not 
know that Harry Mansel will pay a call on the 
Warden to-morrow for a certainty.? Shall I not 
see Lady Anne stop the old barouche, and hammer 
on the glass which always sticks, and carry off 
Molly with her on her afternoon round ? Once 
more the tradesfolk and the cottagers and the 
children will respond to the charm which the 

46 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

young woman seems to carry with her wherever 
she goes. 

That charm is not a matter for simple analysis. 
Molly is twenty-three, and pretty with a prettiness 
that depends a good deal on lights and hours and 
humours, and something on a very sure taste in 
dress; her colour is not quite so constant as it 
should be, and I think there is no feature of her 
face which a critic — certainly not a critic with an 
Elgin-Marbles standard like mine — would consider 
more than tolerable, except her eyes, sometimes, 
when she looks at you ; and when it comes to 
eyes, we Greek-statue people speak without book. 
With that catholicity of taste, which in a young 
lady so often fills me with envious wonder, she 
seems to read somewhat more than her peers 
generally do ; she is rather less endowed in the 
way of athletics than they. When she is not on 
her holidays — and these seem to be chiefly at 
the Lodge — she looks after an ancient cousin in 
Wiltshire. Her likings — for dances and junket- 
ings, Oxford eights and Canterbury cricket weeks ; 
her labours — conscientious needleworks and a 
weight of sponsorial and Sunday-school liabilities 
for her small Wiltshire rustics, are at the ordinary 
rate of her kind. With a gift near genius she 
makes what I understand are very spare resources 
cover her visiting and her dressing, and, I fear, the 
demands of two or three charitable leeches. I 
have heard several people call her " poor Molly," 

47 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

and the adjective, which in Mrs. Sims-Bigg's mouth 
would probably refer to the sort of dinner she was 
accustomed to, has a different meaning when it 
comes from Lady Anne. I make no attempt to 
analyse the subtle attribute, to guess at dim in- 
adequacies or unlikelihoods in a character or a 
career; but I feel vaguely that it is just. What 
shall be done with you, Molly, in this ponderous, 
jostling world, you whose peculiar gift is a singular 
grace in small things ? If any one ever lived to 
show beyond all shadow of doubt how to pour out 
tea, to manage a train on a staircase, to sit on the 
hearthrug and look into the fire, to make an un- 
likely petition to a busy uncle, it is Molly Crofts. 
If ever there should be an Elgin-gallery for such 
graces as these, Molly would have the throne 
in it. 

So far I had got in one of my customary search- 
ing analyses, when I came all at once at the 
Crossways upon Miss Molly herself. Mary Enderby 
had missed her, for she had been foraging round 
the village to replenish her uncle's starved larder, 
and was on her way back to the Almshouse with 
two baskets. We stopped but a moment to speak, 
as she was hurrying home ; but in the ten seconds 
or so in which I met her eyes, how my neatly 
parcelled analysis went to the winds, what a full 
revenge she took for my cocksure sorting-out of a 
young woman's qualities ! The rose light was almost 
gone from the air, and it was fast darkening ; but 

48 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

there surely never could be any other hour so 
fated to bring out from beneath that mingled 
and varying prettiness the authentic sign of 
mere beauty. Whether it was the effect of 
the broad even illumination, or of some deeper 
motion of Molly's spirit showing in her face, or 
whether something was owed to a quickening of 
apprehension on my part, a remembering and 
comparing power, it matters little : I made 
a very whole-hearted obeisance to the vision 
disclosed. 

I said I hoped she had come for a good long 
visit, and she smiled very delightfully, and said 
she thought a fortnight, and so we took our 
several roads ; and most of the way home I had 
the image of Molly before me. It was not the 
voice nor the smile that stuck so in my mind, 
though they came back with still renewed 
pleasure. It was a momentary meaning of her 
face in the failing light, and this given, I think, 
mainly by the eyes, a pathetic grace, a vague 
trouble which I have seen before, and thought to 
imply the first half-incredulous pity, for one's self 
and the rest, waking to the meaning of the world. 
It may be that such an attribution is only one more 
trick of an over-analytic temper, putting the mean- 
ings of a well-worn philosophy upon the fresh 
charm of twenty-three. I wish I could be sure of 
it. The charm had power, spite of philosophies, 
to make me stop ten minutes by the last gate up 

49 E 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

the hill, looking back into the misty darkness and 
the points of light glimmering out in the valley 
below — musing, with a somewhat wiser analysis 
this time, I hope, on the elements, transient or 
durable, which make up the spell. 



50 



VI 



February i8. 
Now and then in the round of the seasons there 
come times when I am inclined to admit the 
possibility of compensations for an indoor exist- 
ence. Such lapses from the higher choice are not 
unknown in November glooms ; but they are 
commonest in February, when the turning of the 
year seems to have come to a stand, when the 
forerunners of spring that had already begun to 
stir dissemble their daring, the crocuses shutting 
their pale outsides close over the deeper gold 
within their cups, the blackbird who had sung for 
a week in the elm by the gate moping with ruffled 
feathers about the lawn. There is neither sun nor 
wind nor visible motion of clouds to give the least 
sign of change ; the garden plots are grey with 
rime, or half drowned in sludgy snow, and the last 
pretence at preparations in the way of stick- 
cutting or sorting of seeds has been exhausted. A 
walk, merely for the sake of a walk, through the 
silent, mist-wrapped fields is apt to become a too 
mechanic exercise, ending in half-conscious count- 
ing of one's steps, and the like dreary introversions. 

51 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

At such times as these a tramp down to the 
village, with a fire-lit room and tea-cakes and 
small scandal at the end of it, appears a thing 
meant by Nature to bridge over her own hiatus, 
and I set out with a clear conscience for the 
Almshouse or The Laurels. The latter I reserve 
for the drier days, since the reception of shooting- 
boots fresh from the lanes is a pang which tries the 
courtesy of the dear ladies severely ; the Warden's 
ragged old Turkey carpet, and the muddy curb of 
his fender feel my heels five times, I fear, for once 
that I imperil the faded roses of Miss Louisa's 
Axminster. The last time that I went to the 
Lodge I found Molly Crofts in command of the 
tea-table, and had to meet with the best face I 
could put upon it the searching glance which fell 
upon my hobnails as I came into the firelight. 
Miss Molly pays a visit to the Almshouse two or 
three times in the year : if the Warden believes 
that he is giving her a needful change from being 
mewed up in a Wiltshire manor-house, and Molly 
knows that if she didn't rout her uncle out now 
and then and put things straight for him, he 
would be all mould and cobwebs, why, no one 
need concern himself to disturb either belief. 

The dismal close of day was sufficient warrant 
for early drawing of curtains and stirring up of the 
fire ; and it was pleasant to see the light come and 
go on the books that cover the walls, on the black- 
framed prints of Bishops and Heads, on the 

52 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

Warden's pipe-racks and littered papers, and, among 
all the bachelor trappings and the paraphernalia of 
learning, on the crinkled brown hair of Miss Molly 
bending over the tea-things. One perceived after 
a time, as men's way is, that it was a new set of 
tea-things, and that there was a jug of narcissus 
on the writing-table, and presently I observed that 
there was a fine new woolly hearthrug, and that the 
old capacious sofa was set at a new and convincing 
angle to the fire. All this tended to a feeling of 
not uncomfortable luxury, heightened by the 
thought of muddy lanes, by the sound of the drip 
from the trees outside in the dark and formless 
night ; but when I said something in this sense, I 
found Molly in a contrary humour and inclined to 
disown her improvements. We were much too 
luxurious ; why should we have all these things, 
while there were people close by us who hardly 
knew how to live ? She had been, I found, into 
some of the cottages in Jubilee Row during the 
afternoon, and had found the Gates and Oram 
households without either bread or firing ; the 
husbands had been out of work through half the 
winter, and Mrs. Oram's ninth infant had the 
croup. And on her way home Molly must have 
met with a tramp whom I had come upon half- 
way up the hill as I walked down to the village, a 
ragged, half-starved creature with one foot out of 
his boot, and his miserable pretence of a bunch of 
laces in his rheumatic fingers : the man was a 

53 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

monument of wet and cold wretchedness, too 
beaten to beg, save by mechanically presenting his 
wares as we met in the road. And so Molly 
frowns as she looks at the fire, and gives us our 
tea as it were under protest, and compares the lots 
of men, and is, I think, for the time very sincerely 
sick at heart and angry. 

It seemed that the Warden had met with the 
tramp on his way home from his rounds, and had 
walked with him from Ball's Cross to the Park. 
" He was a wretched object to look at/* he says ; 
*• but I came to the conclusion that on the whole 
he was about as well off as I am, reckoning one 
thing with another." 

Molly looked worlds at her uncle ; but all she 
said was — 

"And you did nothing for him?" 

" Not at all," he answered ; " I gave him six- 
pence." 

'' Gave him sixpence ! " cries Molly, who has 
stringent ideas of her own about charity and 
" relief" *' Of course he'll spend it on beer at the 
first public-house he comes to ! " 

'Td have given it him for morphia^ my dear," 
replied the Warden, " if I thought he'd have used 
it. Suppose that he is in the Lion at Nyman's 
Corner now, and has had his sixpennyworth, he 
will be one of the happiest men in Sheringham 
parish — far happier than we are in thinking about 
him." 

54 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

Molly taps the floor with her foot. " As if you 
didn't know that I didn't mean happiness of that 
sort!" 

"But, my dear, if you begin to classify and 
qualify happiness, as moral or otherwise, and so 
forth, we shall get into all sorts of tangles. 
Talking merely about comparative pleasure and 
pain in people's lives, you will find, if you look 
into things, that there is a curious balance or 
equality ; much more than most people imagine. 
We aren't all organised alike, for one thing : that 
poor devil doesn't feel the cold and wet as you 
or I would after we'd done ten miles on the road 
from Tisfield Workhouse. That's his gain, the 
rougher fibre : and my loss is that I can't make 
myself glorious with sixpennyworth of bad beer. 
When we talk about all men being equal in the 
sight of Heaven, I never can make out why we 
tie the words down to one meaning out of about 
half a dozen, as if there were not compensations 
everywhet'e^ 

Molly only shakes her head, and has nothing to 
say to such a shocking hypothesis. But the 
Warden is launched on his subject, and turns to 
me, as one already broken in to the theory, and 
perhaps too little apt to shy at a paradox. It 
was the question of the equality of human happi- 
ness which first led him to look into the whole 
matter of the compensatory hypothesis. He made 
Molly fetch him Sir Thomas Browne's " Christian 

55 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

Morals " and La Rochefoucauld, and read us two 
places — 

"There may be no such vast chasm or gulph 
between disparities as common measures deter- 
mine," and — 

"Quelque difference qui paroisse entre les for- 
tunes, il y a neanmoins une certaine compensation 
de biens et de maux qui les rend egales." 

The texts were not unknown to me, and I once 
showed the Warden a passage almost in the same 
terms, but less peremptory, in my own La 
Bruy^re ; but like a wise man he prefers his own 
quarrying. Everybody, he says, admits the exist- 
ence of set-offs and drawbacks ; it is easy enough 
to remember that a fine-natured man has keener 
pleasures and deeper pains than a blunt-edged 
one ; that learning and sorrow increase together ; 
that children are hostages to fortune ; and all the 
rest of the tags : but few people take the trouble 
to observe the actual balancings of loss and gain 
in historical characters, or among their own folk. 
And nobody follows the admission to its logical 
conclusion ; it would be too nearly an admission 
of a governing intelligence for the schools in power 
just now. If any one cares to follow out the 
idea in other directions, he will find the balance 
kept everywhere. Look, at the present time, at 
the increase of the power of scientific observation, 
coupled with the decay of connective reasoning. 
We can afford to smile at the old men's facts ; 

56 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

but they would have made short work of our 
logic. It is not a mere accidental change, but a 
necessary connection of cause and effect ; exactly 
as lenses gain in penetration, they lose in field 
and in the power of keeping several planes in 
focus. 

I came in here with an instance in which I hold 
the Warden's theory to be absolutely true ; the 
disappearance of the arts before the advance of 
the thing which nine people out of ten mean when 
they talk about " science." We are really a little 
too greedy, and want everything at once ; we 
build, when we build seriously, with steel instead 
of stone, but we would like to think our new 
cathedrals as good as Salisbury ; we have invented 
coal-tar dyes, but we grudge the fourteenth century 
its coloured glass ; we'll have our process-blocks, 
and etch like Rembrandt too. The Warden ac- 
cepts my little contribution to the theory, and 
tacks it on to his own position about literature. 
We have made applied mechanics the business of 
the human soul ; and then we are puzzled to know 
why we don't produce bigger poets than, let us 
say . . . eh .? That case is pretty obvious ; poets 
are not like the stained-glass people ; we see the 
scarcity all right, but we think it's only a tem- 
porary accident. Who's the man who said the 
reason why we had no great poets was because 
we could do without them > But to think of 
" science," of all things, ignoring the fact that 

57 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

everything has to be paid for, to the last grain 
and farthing ! The scientific people don't see yet 
that you can't fill hollows without taking down 
heights ; they actually talk about " levelling up " 
and " levelling down " as if the two could be 
separated. And the social economy folk are for 
raising the conditions and enlarging the sphere and 
increasing the comfort, as if they had anything 
but the old world to draw on for supplies : they 
might as well try to create matter ! 

Molly, who had retired behind the defence of 
parish needlework, looks up at last from her 
fairy-fine seam, and breaks in upon her uncle's 
conclusion with — 

" Well, we don't burn witches now, nor behead 
our enemies, or put them on the rack, anyhow. 
And I won't believe we aren't happier than when 
they did things like that 1 " 

"But I don't know, Molly," says the Warden, 
" that they would have thought our blissful state 
of things a good exchange for their own way of 
doing things. I can't help thinking they'd have 
found us horribly dull and lethargic ; they'd have 
kicked at our red-tape, I'm sure. They wouldn't 
have stood our placid oppressions and impersonal 
frauds, and the tangles of interest we lose ourselves 
in whenever we try to give a knock to the re- 
sponsible folk. Take a thing like that open drain 
at Tillman's Green, that goes on just the same as 
ever, spite of all IVe written and said about it: 

58 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

to begin with, they'd too strong stomachs to bother 
about a bit of a smell, and if they had thought 
about it, they would rather somebody should be 
whacked or racked than let a whole parish be 
poisoned half their lives. I wouldn't go into history 
for comparisons, if I were you, Molly ; keep to our 
own times, and think out what is to be said for and 
against being rich and poor, for instance — for being 
Mrs. Sims-Bigg, suppose, or — well — Molly Crofts. 
Think out the advantages of being young and 
quite old. Put one's degenerate mouthful of teeth 
against the pleasure of having them out under 
gas ; or Mrs. Yarborough-Greenhalgh's At Homes 
against the ties of civilised society ; try simple 
set-offs and comparisons like that, Molly." 

Any rejoinder that Molly might have intended 
was prevented by the arrival of Harry Mansel, 
late from a ride. His well-spattered leggings 
received, I fancied, a less searching scrutiny than 
had fallen to the lot of my boots, although the 
lamp was brought in at his entry ; and he was 
settled by the fire with a fresh brew of tea, and 
crumpets all to himself. The conversation split 
itself in two, in the way of congruity ; Molly had 
to attend to the tea-things again, and the Warden 
had to fetch for himself the books he wanted to 
illustrate the great Theory in its dealings with the 
philosophy of history. As the pursuit of Suetonius, 
astray on the top shelves, was a matter of some 
time, I was able to follow pretty well — though the 

59 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

forms and syntax have naturally altered somewhat 
from those of my own time — the talk that went on 
by the fireside. I take it as a very distinguished 
testimonial that Harry Mansel allows my status as 
a possible person. I have known him since he 
was a very small boy indeed, and the under- 
standing which we came to at our first acquaint- 
ance has stood the shock since then of battles 
and many seas, and the wearing of the world. 
It is no small score for a middle-aged person to 
have a boy in his first year at Winchester coming 
over in the holidays to talk inexhaustibly of the 
affairs of life, not translating or making self- 
conscious allowances for the elderly outsider, but 
treating him, one thinks, almost as an equal, with 
the full vernacular and technics of the career ; it 
is nothing less to have the boy, a Captain in a 
Gurkha regiment, coming in on his leaves from the 
Hills, as though neither time nor length of earth 
could make any difference, to talk in the old 
friendly way, not only unspoiled, but apparently 
unchanged by the sights and hearings of his large 
wgrld. Harry was born at Meerut, and has all the 
happy address which seems rarely to fail Indian 
children ; in him the half-alien grace has stiffened 
into a very pleasant sort of manhood. He has 
still a good deal of an early simplicity ; he is not 
too clever ; he has a touch of wholesome insularity, 
a wise phlegm which keeps him unperturbed 
amongst all outlandish distractions and lures. I 

60 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

heard Molly ask him how it felt getting back to 
the Hills after England. Harry's last leave was 
decidedly a full and a gay one, including slices of 
the season in London and Dublin, with a Levee, 
Goodwood, Henley, Cowes, and a fortnight on the 
moors ; but I don't think that Molly — who reads 
Mr. Kipling and has learned in the school of our 
latter-day empirics the proper relation of the part 
and the whole — I don't think she quite expected 
him to answer that it was all right, only everything 
there felt so petty and small after being at home. 
I once asked him, after he had come home on one 
of his long leaves, through China, Japan, and the 
States, how the fair of other lands moved him ; 
and he said that when he got home he felt like 
taking off his hat to half the girls he saw in the 
streets, and thanking them for looking so un- 
utterably jolly. To stay-at-home folk like myself, 
who spite of ourselves half believe the assertion of 
knowing people that we can't understand anything 
about our own country unless we go out of it, this 
sort of testimonial should have an inspiriting 
effect. 

The Warden, though above measure a book- 
man, has (thanks, perhaps, to the great Theory) 
the saving sense to see that there are certain fine 
qualities rarely to be found except in conjunction 
with brains of the less adventurous type. He is 
always ready to take Harry and his kind on their 
own ground, and perhaps to fill up some of his 

6i 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

own empty corners out of their collections. He 
has told me that he used to meet, at College 
breakfasts with the Master, a famous historian 
who, if there chanced to be at table two or three 
undergraduates of the normal intellectual stamp, 
would keep his pearls to himself in absolute silence 
through the meal. The thickest-headed lad there, 
says the Warden, could have taught him some- 
thing which might have made his great History 
a little less of a frigid vacuum than it is. For 
myself, I think a certain catholicity of personal 
taste in acquaintance, the gift of being a " good 
conductor " of sympathies, even a kind of universal 
menstruum or solvent of human nature, is one of 
the most desirable things. Few can be much 
further from this ideal than myself, yet even I can 
take pleasure in thinking of several people with 
whom severally I "get on" very well, the inter- 
action of whose antipathies, if they were to be 
brought into immediate contact — the resultant 
extremes of temperature high or low — I conjecture 
with some solicitude. In few things is the 
possession of a polygonal mind more profitable 
than in this. 

After a little, by way of counter-changing the 
conversation, I left the Warden busy with his re- 
captured Suetonius, and asked Molly to play 
something for us. Harry opened the piano at 
once, and the two conferred together for some 
time at the music-stand as to what we should 

62 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

have. It mattered very little that they pitched 
upon some airs from a musical comedy which they 
had heard in London. Molly plays such things 
with a good deal of spirit, and with Harry 
whistling the air or humming the words here and 
there, and I nodding my head to the kicking 
rhythm of " Pst ! boys, you mustn't make a noise " 
(or words to that effect), and remembering old, old 
songs whose tunes were so very nearly the same 
shuffling of the notes as this, the Warden was left 
very much to himself and his cross-references. 
But after a little I found I was not identifying 
myself with the modern spirit quite so completely 
as I had supposed ; the pass-words had been 
changed more than I had thought since my day. 
I went back to the history, in which the Warden, 
pencil in hand, was ranging like a keen pointer 
in clover, and took up the ends of the Theory 
where I had left them ; but having at last traced 
the reference which had dodged him through half 
a dozen indexes, the Warden slammed down the 
books and came to listen to the music. So I found 
myself left between the two ; yet it was pleasant 
enough to see through half-closed eyes the shaded 
light, the serene hearth, the rows of books, — the 
sober company waiting to come in with their silent 
colloquy when all this cheery jingle and chatter 
was done. I think we all managed, in our several 
ways, to forget the forlorn households in Jubilee 
Row, and the soaked tramp on the road to the 

63 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

casual ward. It was only when I turned out into 
the raw black night that the universal Theory 
came back to mind, and I wondered whether it 
would admit the possibility, in certain cases, of 
deferred payment of balances, either with interest 
or without. 



64 



VII 

March 5. 
There is, after all, nothing like the punctual 
recurrence of minor duties for preventing the 
formation of theories of life on too large a scale, 
the building of inverted pyramids in space. While 
the claim, six days out of seven, on the virgin fore- 
noon is unquestionably Nym's walk, one is not 
likely to have many dreams about whistling the 
world to heel. Nym prefers the fields, with all their 
chances of the hedgerow jungles, rat-holes in the 
banks, rabbits lying out on the edge of the wood, 
to the prosaic highroad ; and so at this season we 
tramp round the swampy pastures and scramble 
through the shaws, with such observation of the 
signs of spring, and such chance reflections as our 
devious wanderings and skirmishes amongst the 
underwoods suggest or allow. To-day we found 
a nook on the fringe of the copse we call Wopses- 
boorne — " Wapsbourne" is the literary form — which 
shut out the northerly wind and let in all the sun ; 
and there we sat for half an hour, Nym content to 
be still for once, with his nose on his paws, while 
we thought our thoughts in the lull and warm air 

65 F 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

of the shelter. There was nothing in the fields to 
suggest spring, except the dusky, almost blackish, 
green of the new grass, with glittering points and 
edges where the light struck : the larks sprang up 
with a few hasty notes, and would not mount, but 
drifted away aslant and dropped again in a few 
moments. Several times one or two of them 
hung almost over my head as I sat still, only a 
few yards away, and I noticed their wings, seen 
at full stretch with the sun shining through them ; 
beautiful translucent vans that gave the idea, not 
of separate feathers, but of stretched tissue, " bent " 
like the canvas of a sail, pebble-coloured or pale 
fawn-yellow shading to grey ; and there came a 
notion that here was a meaning for one of those 
seeming-otiose words in Homer, which one would 
so like to put the colour to — ravvaiirTepog — the 
sense of tautness, thinness, transparence, as of 
a sail in sunlight. (The authorities, I found when 
I looked up the word, allow at least such a loop- 
hole for the conjecture as no self-respecting critic 
would hesitate to use.) 

In the midst of such ingenious recreations as 
these, I suddenly caught the sound of the church 
bell, a mere pulse of sound against the wind ; and 
counting the strokes up to twelve and over, I knew 
that it was "the knell going out," and, by our 
careful country signal-code, learned that old Jack 
Miles had died since last night. And then one 
must needs be a little ashamed at one's easy- 

66 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

going etymologic diversions. Our workaday 
life, with people we know dying round about us, 
comes back and turns out peremptorily enough 
such whims as what some one once thought about 
birds* wings by the Ionian sea. And so that 
matter flits away, skim-winged enough; and the 
burden of due gravity returns. 

Of late Death has been busy amongst us, as 
we say : surely a quaint turn, this, to the inevitable 
personification! In a thinly peopled world like 
ours, where we know thoroughly by face and 
history almost every neighbour in the surround- 
ing two square miles or so, death is a thing 
intimate and observed in a way hardly to be 
realised, I think, by a town-dweller. For the 
most part we possess a remarkably stoical temper, 
long become instinctive, a provision of Nature, as 
we say, to enable us to get through our work duly, 
in the absence of distractions found elsewhere. 1 
was looking into Seneca's Epistles a short time 
ago, and being struck by the curious effect of 
nervous solicitude which those constant contemn- 
ings of death produce — a sort of " damme ! who's 
afraid?" attitude — I thought how vastly better 
our country people have learned to manage it. 
They seem to have destroyed the last touch of 
terror by mere matter-of-factness, looking at the 
event clear-eyed, bringing it down by homely 
perception and more than a hint of the grotesque. 
Jhey talk about it without the smallest reserve or 

(>7 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

awe ; there is a deal of meaning in the consequence 
of the corpse — often far beyond anything the live 
man attained to — and in the circumstance of the 
obsequies. What thoughts may come at the end 
to the spirit whose flame burns clear to the last 
flicker, no one tells ; but at the least the method 
serves to keep a lifetime free from the disturbance 
of that particular fear, down to the farthest step 
which we can follow. 

Last Sunday, a warm, still afternoon, that 
brought the snowdrops fully out, and set the 
blackbirds singing, half the parish was in the 
churchyard to see the funeral of Dick Holman, 
a solemnity which peculiarly satisfied the require- 
ments of village interest. Dick had been a fresh- 
faced lad, somewhat overgrown, perhaps, whom 
we had scarcely missed from his work of road- 
mending before we heard of blood-spitting and 
** decline." Some sort of pathos touched the 
public mind, I think : a vague sense of destinies 
unaccomplished. Mary Bennett, with whom poor 
Dick had but a month ago exchanged the pro- 
bationary " walking-out " for a serious engagement, 
was on the edge of the throng, in a sort of half- 
mourning, apart from the universal blacks of the 
family, unauthorised, but allowed by the popular 
judgment ; tearful, but, in measure, with alleviating 
consciousness of distinction — such mercies there be 
of consolation. For a time, no doubt, Mary will 
make the pious pilgrimage to the churchyardj^ 

6Z 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

which is our people's treasured reason for a Sunday 
afternoon stroll ; unostentatiously, a little apart 
from the family, which she will, I conjecture, join 
on the way home, and be asked in to tea with. 
And presently there will be Sunday walkings-out 
again in other directions; and so one more 
experience added to the placid and common- 
place understanding of a great fact. 

Two days after Dick's burying, Rebecca Wick- 
ham, sixty-nine, with a grown-up family, living in 
all apparent peace and content with her old man 
at Dudman's Cottages, is found head downwards 
in ten feet of water in her own well. Some neigh- 
bour early astir (Tuesday is market day) saw her 
in her garden patch in the first of the dawn — 
" terrible cold morning it was, with a smart frost 
on the ground ; he thought it was middling early 
for ol' Mis' Wickham to be about, but it didn't 
come into his mind again, not till he heard as how 
she was missing." She must have pushed back 
the slide of the well-lid herself ; as much as a man 
could do, mostly. No one knows of any reasons ; 
she had been pretty bad with the rheumatics, but 
had not much else to complain of, by all accounts; 
our cottage-folk have not yet found out that reason 
of Seneca's for dying because of the tedium in 
always doing the same things; the daily water- 
fetching and potato-peeling don't seem to give 
time for such fancies. And the old couple were 
well-to-do, according to the standards of Dudman's 

69 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

Cottages. Strange, that the two daughters who 
are out in service had been written to, to get them 
to come home on the very day the mother was 
drowned. One thing clear — that she meant it ; 
there was no occasion to draw from the well at 
that hour, two pails from over-night standing full 
in the washhouse. Between the discovery and 
the inquest, I think the neighbourhood lives in 
guesses at the motive and some sort of recon- 
struction of the tragedy, as near the dramatic 
conception, perhaps, as their minds ever reach — 
the sudden resolution ; the creeping down the 
creaking stairs so as not to waken the old man ; 
the barefoot stumble through the frozen twilight ; 
the struggle with the rimy well-lid ; the moment's 
pause on the green-slimed edge — all these imagina- 
tions react in a not unpleasing horror; and once 
again death's sting is soundly dunted on a solid 
sense of the real. 

And now, to fulfil the belief of the parish that 
deaths go in threes, the sullen, surly bell tells us 
that old Jack Miles is gone at last ; and some of 
us will be saying it is a mercy ; and some that 
there's none to miss him ; and the prophets who 
have buried him twenty times this year are finally 
justified. Had he died in his prime, Jack might 
have had a notable funeral, for thirty years ago he 
was cock of the village, the parish bully, the 
natural captain of the wilder spirits, famed beyond 
the bounds as a man of his hands and one that 

70 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

never skulked from the provocations of the law. 
His was a sounding youth. He fell in with a 
gang of the navvies who made the first railway- 
through Sussex and did so much to educate the 
natives in ways still to be traced. He was, when 
still a boy, one of the famous band which sacked 
the coverts of a neighbouring baronet, after send- 
ing the head-keeper a written notice of the coming 
foray. A born fighter, he had a full share in the 
battles which roused the Sunday calm of the 
village green ; he remembered as one of the great 
days of his life the opening of the new railway, 
when the countryside came in thousands as to a 
fair, to venture themselves on rides in open trucks, 
given gratis to mark the day ; when the Bolney 
cherry-orchards were stripped to heap the stalls 
spread on both sides of the line ; when the after- 
noon was given to the noble art, and there were 
eighteen duly formed rings to be seen at one time 
on the adjacent heath. After many a slip through 
the fingers of keepers and constables both Petty 
and High, Jack first found himself in jail for 
smashing a fine new shop window — the first size- 
able plate glass ever seen in Sheringham Street — 
" twenty-five foot super all in one piece," he used 
to say in after-days, with the chastened pride of a 
purged offence, " and not a piece left as big as two 
fingers." His middle age was stormy and full of 
change ; a Herculean lifter of sacks of flour and 
sticks of timber, a prodigious worker when the 

71 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

humour took him, he managed to live with a free 
hand between his outbreaks and his occasional 
puttings-away. He took a wife, and settled in a 
lonely cottage at a lane's end, which appears as 
" L corner " in the maps, but in the light of its 
master's goings-on found a new meaning for the 
customary aspirate of the spoken word. Not 
at first a drinker above the ordinary, Jack soon 
began to win fame for a heroic capacity for ale ; 
the tale of quarts he could hold at a sitting, his 
feats for a wager, when he would drink standing 
on his head in the Dolphin, appal the degene- 
rate modern hearer. In those days there was 
sounder, if stronger liquor to be had than the 
" brewer's beer," which — like " baker's bread " — is 
still a name of scorn among the older men, and it 
had its natural antidote in the huge labours of 
haytime and harvest, the moonlight summer nights 
through which Jack ranged the woods. He was 
among his other trades a notable pig-killer ; and 
whether the tramping the country from farm to 
farm, together with the drouthy influence popularly 
credited to dealings with the insides of pigs were 
the cause ; or whether, as most believed, it was 
that they broke the news of his wife's death to 
him too sudden-like; he fell swiftly to be the 
merest drunkard in four or five parishes. He 
ceased even from his spasmodic fits of work ; he 
came before the magistrates for endless disorders 
which were very leniently regarded by no small 

72 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

section of the community, and finally became a 
hero when, expressing the popular mind, he broke 
the constable's jaw with a brickbat when the 
officer was carrying out the new-fangled regulation 
which forbade the immemorial Guy Faux bonfire 
in the middle of the street. When he reappeared 
six months afterwards, there was seen an astonish- 
ing change; he took the pledge, and confounded 
the wise folk by keeping it without a trip until the 
zest of watching for a relapse was wholly staled. 
For eleven years he was the prop and pride of the 
local temperance platforms, an asset that figured 
perennially in their accounts. He married again, 
set up a pony and cart, and on that and his wife's 
mangle lived in decent prosperity, reminiscent of 
the old black times as from a safe haven, not 
without his own satisfactions. It was a point with 
him that howsoever many times he had read the 
deep-cut " Go, and sin no more," which faces the 
out-going prisoner above the gateway of the County 
jail, he " never was a theft." He held a notable 
position amongst the untried good, as one that 
had come back from the Pit, and reported of it 
much in the sense of the moralists' conjectures. 
And then, with no perceptible cause, came back- 
sliding sudden and complete ; the good years are 
wiped out in a fortnight ; John Miles's name is 
crossed off the temperance books, and the cause 
reels under the loss of its standing instance. The 
little carrier's business goes ; the pony and cart 

71 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

go ; the wife and her mangle presently get a 
separation-order. For a couple of years old Jack 
hangs about the Dolphin yard ; a sodden, tattered 
old blackguard, the argument and pride of the 
graceless haunters of the bar, as once of the ladies 
of the Primitive Rechabites. For a time his head 
keeps its natural force amidst the ruin. His 
fighting instinct leads him to the village green as 
of old ; if a degenerate race has sunk from the 
prize-ring to half-day cricket matches, there are 
still open-air religious exercises to be confounded 
with ribald noises, and stump politicians of either 
colour to be put out with interruptions of rough 
humour, couched in dialect of histrionic breadth. 
Five parsons and all their curates has the repro- 
bate known ; and all that their labours (together 
with the occasional shepherding of the Primitive 
minister and the Strict Baptist "supplies") have 
managed to instil seems to be a wavering doubt 
that it may be true about hell-fire after all. 

Old Jack's tremendous constitution holds out 
through pleurisies and delirium tremens year by 
year, against the muddy beer and flaming whisky. 
He is tended by a great-niece, a prettyish, hectic 
girl, who, with no pretence of affection, very nearly 
kills herself in the work, and receives from the 
village opinion a curiously mixed testimony, part 
unwilling admiration for her sacrifice, part indig- 
nation against the obstinate devotion to an office 
" which she hadn't no call to do.'* And now the 

74 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

bell is going, and old John affords a morality to 
all the thinking street ; and Lou, the great-niece, 
will be allowing herself the well-earned reward of 
choosing not unbecoming black at Mrs. Lewry the 
dressmaker's ; and one finds one's self wondering — 
the only matter of doubt remaining about old Jack's 
affairs, perhaps — what will become of "Marker," 
the one-eyed lurcher to whom the dreadful old 
rapscallion was all the world. 

It does not need the knell thrice in a week to 
make the world smack of mortality more than it 
did once within no long memory. Without the 
argument of the final instance, one sees more and 
more easily the approaches and preparatories of 
death, coming about us like some grey, quiet 
lapping tide, reaching up here to sand and here to 
stone, touching and marking, over-running, un- 
covering, hiding again ; through all counter-motions 
one feels the depth behind the lifting flow. To 
change the figure, it is natural enough that as a 
man grows older the blood should chill more and 
more readily at the great cold of space which lies 
beyond the frail partition of human needs and 
daily works, of kindly air and daedal earth ; it is 
perhaps inevitable with men who hold strongly 
to the past, but have failed to link themselves 
at all closely with the interests of the coming 
generation. There are temperaments which lie 
singularly open to this influence — Charles Lamb's 
"poor snakes" — to whom the good world becomes 

75 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

more than they could wish the sign of life, whose 
humours shrink at physical cold and dark, and 
respond to the passing of a cloud or the lulling 
of the wind in a way they would be troubled to 
defend. To such natures the motion of the spring 
is of course very significant ; it is the forward lift 
of the waves, on which they let themselves go, to 
hang on, like Ulysses on the Phaeacian crags, under 
the backwash of the "fall." It is the annual 
miracle which should tune up our religion ; yet it 
has its own bitternesses. The contrast of the 
immemorial process with our own decay is too 
sharp at times ; it is the primrose and the night- 
ingale which return, signs which shall stand un- 
changed a thousand years after our last April at 
the copse ; to lose our distinctions in the type 
seems to be beyond our reach. One may, when 
the humour takes, find a sort of calendar of loss 
in the very movement of the spring ; on such a 
day the anemones are over for the year ; to-morrow 
the hawthorn scatters along the grass. But spite 
of all such set-backs, the main purpose holds, the 
vis vivida pervicit ; and the great argument from 
beauty in the world stands for the time irre- 
fragable. 

One side of the little nook in the wood where 
I sat was made by a shelf of sandstone rock, and 
as the pulse of the knell came dully on the air 
like a minute-gun, I found myself during my 
meditations mechanically counting the stratum- 

76 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

lines in the stone, ticking off each stroke of the 
bell against a fresh striation. And when the mind 
cleared itself from a certain hazy lapse not far 
from oblivion, I found myself in possession of a 
very obvious, yet little used answer to some ugly 
questionings upon the subject of Time. Here is 
a man by the Ionian sea, who can amuse my 
idle morning across twenty-five centuries with a 
fancy about birds' wings ; well, but suppose that 
at length the stretch of tradition fails, that all that 
world is whelmed at last under seas of black 
forgetfulness, when, as Seneca says, the profound 
of Time shall be heaped over us, while here and 
there a greater mind shall lift itself above the 
flood, and long hold out against oblivion, though 
doomed to sink at last into the universal silence. 
Suppose the heroic ages no more than one of these 
knife-edge layers, red or tawny, across the stone 
by my shoulder ; Homer himself no more than a 
fine shell-fossil beneath a hundred folds of the silt 
of being ; do we not feel the strata already heavy 
upon us ? feel the mortal cold of the innumerable 
series of years ? To such fancies the knell, counting 
the laying-down of the courses of the world, replies 
with head-clearing, sober sense, and hints a way 
out of our confused reckoning. 

As the tolling bell, after its melancholy- three 
times three and its count of John Miles's years, 
turned to a quicker stroke, "settling" to hang 
silent in the belfry again, I got up from the little 

17 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

nook beneath the rock and turned homewards, 
trying to make a balky memory give the right 
words to the sense of that place in the Timaeus — 
one of those sayings which seem to make a strange 
silence for themselves in the mind — the place 
which calls Time the mobile image of the Eternal, 
created together with the heavens, with days and 
nights, and months and years, and past and future, 
the forms of Time which in our forgetfulness we 
attribute to the eternal essence. And then, one 
text linking on to another as it should, I remem- 
bered pretty exactly that of Montaigne : " Dieu 
qui par un seul maintenant emplit le toujours." 
And last there came the rote-learned words : " A 
thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday,'* 
which some of us — Lou the niece, and perhaps two 
or three old mates, sad rogues, sheepishly strange 
in church — will be saying on Sunday afternoon, 
when the last of old Jack Miles's tale is told. 



78 



VIII 

March 17. 
To pass under the archway of the Almshouse 
lodge is to make an effectual retreat from the 
hubbub of the world. The echoing passage, with 
its vaulted roof and iron-studded doors, is a sort 
of ante-chamber to the house of peace ; three steps 
across its worn flagstones take the worldling from 
the noise and stir of the street, the business of 
journeyings, marketings, politics, newspapers, to 
the haven where time almost stands still, and 
there is nothing to distract the day between the 
morning and evening chapel bells. To pace round 
the trim green square, to stop here and there for 
a word with one of the grey-coated pensioners on 
the benches under the rose-hung wall, to listen to 
the old humours and histories is a " change *' such 
as is not to be found in many a thousand miles of 
travel, as men travel nowadays, taking with them 
the small remnant of accustomed things which they 
will not find in their caravanserais and convoys. 
Under the present dispensation the outer world 
has hardly more entrance into the Warden's lodg- 
ing than it has into the almsmen's quadrangle. 

79 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

Whether he is to be found in his study, or in the 
Green Parlour, the Warden maintains unfaih'ngly 
the charmed circle against the spirit of the time. 
What we call the Green Parlour is a yew hedge in 
the garden, cunningly contrived by some old hand 
with curves and returns this way and that to catch 
every chance of sun, and fence out every peevish 
air : a shelter high and thick, proof against all but 
the most villanous north-easter, and roofed against 
showers at one end by the boughs of an undipped 
yew. There are benches and a stone table, and a 
sort of niche or aumbry cut in the live green, to 
hold books or other refreshment. The Warden is 
a great man for the open air, and, above all, dislikes 
the superfetation of tobacco within walls. I believe, 
too, that he has some theory about a like redun- 
dancy in discussion indoors ; at any rate, he is to 
be found in one or other of the nooks at the proper 
angle of the hedge, on most mornings when it is 
possible to smoke and read out-of-doors. I found 
him the other day in two minds, whether to stay 
in the sunny corner or shift for the first time this 
year to the shady side. There was a cloudless 
sun, but we had not had enough of him yet, and 
I gave my vote for the southern bench. From 
that vantage-point one looks across the Warden's 
lawn with its steps and sundial to a low stone wall, 
flourished with stonecrop and weeds, and over 
the ranges of the almsmen's garden-plots to the 
hayfields and hedges, the orchards and back 

80 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

gardens that fringe the village street. It is a 
reposeful outlook ; the village life and works are 
scarcely visible ; only here and there among the 
trees the wood-fire smoke, a clothes-line fluttering 
its pennons across a cabbage-patch, a figure moving 
behind a gapped hedge, guessed at by glimpse of 
shirt-sleeves or apron as Mas' Tingley or Em 
Brazier. But to the accustomed eye there is parish 
history to be read in every sign. The festooned 
napery signifies the return of our friends the Sims- 
Biggs from town ; the old grey pony out at grass 
on a market-day tells us that Ben the higgler is 
still laid fast by the rheumatics ; and if Em Brazier 
likes to bring out her sewing to the bottom of her 
mother's garden-strip, to pace up and down in the 
sun and wind by the elder hedge, the observer 
draws reasonable conclusions from the fact that 
Tom Lelliot the cowman is cutting hay from the 
rick just over the fence. The sun shines pleasantly 
on Em's bare head and Tom's swarthy arms, and 
if an occasional syllable of livelier dalliance reach 
our ears in the Green Parlour, it seems, to my 
taste, to fit tuneably enough to the key of the 
hour. To the Warden these signs of life are 
merely teasing details, if they contrive at all to 
make themselves felt by his thinking part. He 
thanks God he is not a parish priest ; this year of 
duty taken at a pinch will suffice for his lifetime in 
that kind of experience. The Vicar will be home 
again in three months, and then he will leave the 

8i G 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

work among the cottages, which he was never 
meant to do, and will get back to his books and 
fulfil his proper ends. He looks grimly at the 
prospect of the fold which he finds in such an 
unlikely manner committed to his care, the 
peaceful-seeming roofs, the orchard-boughs, the 
comings and goings of the sunlit aureole on Em 
Brazier's giddy head, drawing down his brows in a 
penthouse frown, and clasping his great thin hands 
across his knee with a nervous tension. I think I 
can guess something of his frame of mind — the 
self-contempt for failure trying to work itself up 
into a just wrath at the putting of the whole absurd 
business into his unwilling hands. I know some- 
thing of other estimates of his work ; I remember 
the wish expressed a few weeks ago by old Mrs. 
Francis, a representative of the more archaic ways 
of thinking, that Mr. Blenkinsopp wouldn't come 
back before his lungs was properly mended, as he 
had no call to hurry home while we had Dr. Nowell 
to look after us. Others have hinted a sense of 
Providential compensations alleviating the Vicar's 
regretted chest attack. I have put this point of 
view before the lociLin tenens^ but I do not propose 
to renew the experiment. 

Meanwhile, the morning's visiting resolutely 
done, the Warden sweeps away the recollection 
of all the infinite littles with a restless shift on 
the bench, which shuts out of his view the house- 
roofs and the garden-patches and all the visible 

82 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

signs of his flock and fold. He had a letter 
yesterday, he tells me, from Blenkinsopp at Cape 
Town, who by this time is heading for New Zealand, 
and so may be said to be on the home stretch ; 
three months more, and the temporary hireling 
will have the parish off his shoulders, and will be 
free to settle down again to collect materials for 
the Philosophy of History on a new plan, the 
great theory of Compensations or Moral Balance 
of Power, whose decent carrying-out and burial in 
his friends' libraries, with an Athenceum headstone, 
he will have us believe, is the remaining object of 
his life. No one, so far as I can discover, has ever 
seen anything of the great work. Molly Crofts, 
quoting a classic of her youth, says it's all his 
fancy, that ; he never writes anything, you know. 
It must at any rate be all in his head, to judge 
from the way the theory comes in pat upon all 
sorts of subjects which one can talk about. He 
will just be able to hold out, he says, till the Vicar 
is home again. It will be high time then for the 
parish and himself to get back to their accustomed 
ways. I say nothing ; but there comes before 
me the vision of an old-fashioned, gentlemanly 
presence, a little over-gracious and courtly in 
manner ; of a daily walk as of one whose religion 
has lain chiefly in the avoiding of other people's 
corns, and derives its strength to a considerable 
extent from the recollection that there was a 
bishop in his wife's family. The Vicar must have 

83 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

been handsome as a young man, and at times 
even now such a cherubic expression lights his 
face, at once infantine and paternal, that we forget 
that recurrent bishop, and the quondam curate 
who was also an Honourable, and the feminine 
entourage which feeds the dim mythus of a strong 
heroic prime in a manufacturing parish in the 
North, a cure which, but for a change of Ministry, 
ought to have brought the family a second bishop- 
ric. His face should be comely enough with its 
clear colour and shapely nose and white hair ; 
but all is spoiled by a terrible mouth, slack, and 
wide, and flat-lipped, of a type which seems almost 
distinctive of elderly clerics of a certain school and 
standing ; it must be formed, one thinks, by the 
lifelong enunciation of platitudes, and a lack of 
humour to turn up its corners. The Warden, with 
his shaggy brows and hook nose is quaintly ugly ; 
but the small thin-lipped mouth, mobile with 
coming thought, twitching in momentary smiles, 
lifted in sensitive disgust, redeems the rest. If 
one wanted to find a " blind mouth " in the flesh, 
I think that that flat-lipped, well-scraped type 
would fit the case very nearly : perhaps the pattern 
was known in Milton's day. And though the 
Warden's tongue can be bitter, the cottage people 
respond at once, as they rarely fail to do when 
they get the chance, to live meaning and direct 
reference to their personal level and scale. Already 
they begin to look forward with somewhat doubtful 

84 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

understandings to the return of the accustomed 
shepherd and the renewal of the remembered 
pabulum which some call spiritual, and to which 
some give a Miltonic and simpler sense of the 
word. This being so, it is perhaps only in the 
natural order of things that the Warden should 
be already fretting to hand back the responsi- 
bilities and opportunities of the sole charge to 
the absent priest. He was meant, he says, in 
all things to be a spectator, a wallflower at the 
cosmic rout ; any earlier motions towards joining 
the dance have departed with gathering years. I 
can understand his feeling, being myself one of 
those who, whether at the solemnity of a sub- 
scription-dance or in the stour of party warfare, 
own a centrifugal tendency like that of straws in 
a water-butt to the periphery. I am with him, 
too, when he goes on to claim a proper function 
for the onlooker, the man in the mean state, 
immune from party contagions of the hour, free 
from the curse of impatience which will have the 
issue settled out of hand in its own sense. We 
itch to form our great-grandsons' opinions for 
them : we want our testaments to be of effect 
without the deaths of the testators. A thousand 
generations slipping on this side and that in a 
fatal relativity only serve to make us the surer 
of our own final capture of absolute truth. One 
picks up, says the Warden, a half-crown monthly, 
fresh and fine, smelling of printers' ink and of 

85 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

consequence, and finds the universe recast by a 
dozen of ladies and gentlemen, most of whom afford 
an instance of the inversion of the primary meanings 
of language in the word " doubt." Well, says the 
Warden, he puts it all away, mentally, on a top 
shelf for twenty-five years, and takes it down 
again, at some more searching spring-cleaning, 
with black-grimed edges, smelling of dust and 
of impotence. Were these scrambling lop-sided 
theses in detestable machine-made English — mere 
flyblows of literature — were they the oracles which 
unsettled shaky souls, and encouraged the esprits 
forts to have another shy at God ? Did these 
writers — the Dr. Macgurgles and Mrs. Alethea 
K. Bangses — persuade themselves for a minute 
that this dead verbiage, that stinks before the year 
is out, was speech that counts, the haud mortale 
sonanSy the fated body which clothes all vital 
thought ? Did they really overlook the eternal 
proportion between sound and sense ? Did they 
never perceive the curious effect of their essays 
taken in the mass, their collective value as a 
symptom ? How was it that there never dawned 
on them a guess of the tremendous solemnity 
of the performance, the fatal unanimous lack 
of humour, the provincialism, the mystery of 
vulgarity ? All this made clear and plain, says 
the Warden, " pulveris exigui jactu ; " think of ten 
years' dust on the shelf, and the thing comes down 
to its right proportions at once. 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

I had listened to the Warden's deliverance, as 
I have listened at other times, waiting till it 
should come round to the inevitable master- 
theory, more than half occupied, I think, with 
the interlude going on by the hedge, where the 
conference of Em and the cowman has certainly 
cost the country half a seam and a good truss 
out of the morning's work. Something else has 
gone forward, no doubt ; compensations even here 
which might be hitched into the Warden's scheme, 
if he cared to look so near his own bounds. He 
is away again amongst the trains of thought 
suggested by those articles in the bottle-green 
review, the ever-clearer fact that there is no 
middle term in works of the human mind ; a thing 
is either live or dead, it has a touch of Promethean 
fire or it has not ; and if there is one clear fact 
in a world of fog, it is the visible seal of 
authenticity in the manner of a man's expres- 
sion. Truth will not endure to be told in the 
chap-tongue and vernacular of the mob : she 
has her mysteries, her pass-words and signs, 
a language of her own, out of which nothing 
was ever yet said that mattered two days 
together. 

I could not resist bringing in here my favourite 
notion of the working of that blessed sieve which 
drops out all the infinite rubbish of letters, and 
leaves us — if we are willing to stop at the last hun- 
dred years or so — the absolute and unimpeachable 

87 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

good things sorted to our hands. The Warden 
nods and accepts my little contribution for what 
it is worth ; when the great new Philosophy of 
History, built round the fundamental Law of 
Compensation, shall see the light, such fragments 
will be found ordered in their due station in 
the pile. But we shall have to wait, for a 
proper statement of natural laws such as these, 
till the meanest tyranny of thought ever known 
comes to an end, and an astoundingly simple a 
posteriori system comes down with all the dead 
weight heaped upon it. No chance of that in our 
time ? Every chance ! says the Warden : the 
thing has blown itself up too fast to stand ; it has 
no roots under it, no struggles, no martyrs. . . . 
The sense of humour is not really dead yet in the 
world ; we shall wake up some day to see the 
meaning of science hunting the trail backwards 
and losing its power of reasoning in exact pro- 
portion to its accumulation of facts. There's a 
day of reckoning coming for the people with bald 
heads and grey side-whiskers, and semi-evening 
shirt-fronts, turn-down collars, and black bow 
ties, who are called "thinkers" by way of dis- 
tinction. 

This strain was not altogether new to me ; and 
I had been watching the almsmen in their garden- 
plots, who when the Almshouse clock tolled the 
dinner hour at its customary protesting interval 
after the church chimes, knocked off their feeble 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

work, and began to straggle towards the quad- 
rangle. Some as they passed the end of the yew 
hedge looked towards us vacantly, some with 
more or less perfunctory salute, some one or two 
with the ingenuous grin of heartfelt recognition. 
I put it to the Warden that he had a body-guard, 
at any rate, to keep the thinking race at their 
distance. Ay, he says, and the best of them all 
is old John Blaker, who never could read nor 
write : and the next, Harding and Everest, who 
have managed pretty well to forget their learning. 
They are certainly a great defence ; but even they 
can't keep people like Myram and Dempster out 
of one's sunshine. Dempster is the schoolmaster, 
whom the Warden observes with lifted nostril, 
in a sort of fascinated horror, as one might 
a curious and pestilent insect. Mr. Myram, our 
chief employer of labour, has all the heartbreaking 
virtues of his kind ; the little man is rotundly 
prosperous, grossly well-meaning, a pillar of 
Church and State, such as our blind Samson 
of the polls already feels with twitching arms. 
Suppose, the Warden says, that the people who 
manage our country just now could be made to 
look at Blaker and Dempster together, and com- 
pare them impartially : he wonders whether even 
their systems would not yield to the inference. 
Perhaps not just yet, but they will come to sense 
in time ; they are throwing over their eternal 
principles much faster than they did twenty years 

89 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

ago. Some day they'll actually see that a man's 
real value is not touched by the three R's or any- 
thing else poured into him by Dempster and his 
mates. They'll put the story of Theuth into their 
Standard Readers presently, and will see that we 
are only worth what we dig for ourselves out of 
the stuff of life. And then, when the abominable 
tyranny of the press and print is knocked out, 
there will be wonderful times. In a thousand 
years .^ In a century! The balance of things 
is about made up, and the great year is nearly 
due. 

And there, the talk having reached a familiar 
anchorage, I find it is time to be going home- 
wards. From the square drifts the savour of the 
old men's dinners : Em Brazier has taken her 
sewing indoors, and the honest cowman is working 
with uncommon energy to fill up his tale of trusses, 
making the hay-knife flash in the sun as he digs 
into the rick. The school-bell jangles from the 
far end of the village, and Mr. Dempster is re- 
suming his national function with the ladle and 
the jar. The world is spinning still, and we must 
needs renew our little vortices in its wake. But 
as I mount the meadow-path for home, I look 
back on the green quad of the Almshouse, saying 
over to myself the Warden's Montaigne text over 
his study fireplace: "J'essaye de soustraire ce 
coing a la tempeste publique, comme je fais un 
autre coing en mon ame ; " and once more I 

90 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

commend the spectatorial attitude, the taste for 
standing-out, setting one's back to the containing 
wall of things, and giving one's eyes their chance, 
at least, of seeing something of the course of 
time. 



91 



IX 



April 15. 
It is perhaps part of a backward-looking idio- 
syncrasy that in dreams I so often return to old 
neighbourhoods. I do not mean the re-enacting 
of the past on the remembered scene, which I 
suppose is one of the commonest shapes of dream- 
ing ; but the wilful returning as an alien to revisit 
the places of twenty, thirty years ago, the mind 
quite conscious of the changes but at the same 
time somehow forgetting the space between. In 
waking hours it is almost a religion with me to 
avoid the crossing of old paths and the opening 
of closed doors ; but that odd half-brother self of 
dreams has no such scruples. Most of all in these 
visitations do I explore the gardens which I have 
left behind me : very rarely a shadowy Idlehurst ; 
sometimes the shore of Sandwell dimly figured 
through the early mists ; oftenest the domain 
abandoned in the middle years, when the lesion 
of exile seldom quite heals. In almost every case 
the garden sleeps in a rich air of content, and I 
pace about the walks, mostly busy with one occu- 
pation, the choosing of plants or roses — ghosts of 

92 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

authentic possessions, most of these, but sometimes 
the mere extravagance of fabulous plenty — to be 
transported to the new ground which exists, in 
some serene confusion of ownership, together with 
the old. 

These imaginations sometimes hold on even into 
the daylight musings, and the plan and lie of an 
earlier domain at times almost blot out the material 
beds and paths amongst which I walk. At its 
own hours the recollection comes, making nothing 
of the actual garden or the prospect beyond its 
bounds. Nine times out of ten it is of a corner of 
Surrey, half suburban in the sense the word still 
bore some forty years ago ; of spaces of lawn 
larger than the chain would have accounted them, 
shadowed by a cedar, a pair of great elms, the 
relics of older state, shut in from the highway dust 
by a thicket of a hundred neighbour shrubberies 
and orchards, and by some remainders of wild 
wood — a purplish mist of boughs, thickening down 
the hillside in the spring suns, with here a pink 
cloud of almond blossom, and here a gap of April 
blue. The actual garden of the present hour is a 
steeply falling patch half converted from kitchen 
to flower quarters, fenced with a stubby quickset 
hedge, beyond which lie a slope of meadows, the 
river-valley, the spire and the tops of the village, 
the wooded ridges of the Weald, and for horizon 
the long grey wall of the Downs. To tell the 
truth, the landscape overpowers the garden ; it is 

93 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

only in the full height of summer that the sun- 
flowers and hollyhocks and peas wall out some- 
thing of the prospect, and give the plot a chance 
of being considered on its own merits. At other 
seasons the enclosure is too evidently a mere clear- 
ing carved out of the wilderness, and held as an 
outpost with constant watch and ward against the 
recurrent forces, the ceaseless invasion of weeds 
and wildings, of birds and beasts that claim their 
free-warren of the old forest and something more. 
In that warfare on my lonely height I sometimes 
think with a rebellious sense of comparison of 
other closes which I have known, safe shut in high 
walls, down among the neighbourly ways of men, 
where neither bramble nor dock, mole nor rabbit 
profanes the ground. Still, it is something to 
maintain one's post, spite of chaffinch and leather- 
coat and brown mouse ; there is the long path 
and the cross path and the middle path for one's 
walks and meditations, with worts and flowers 
doing reasonably well in the brown loam, and the 
noble landscape broad-spread before one's eyes. It 
should not be easy for a man to become morbidly 
introspective with half the county in his view, 
and the village sounds coming up on the wind to 
suggest the busy concerns which thrive just below 
the hill ; the war with the wild things keeps a 
strenuous mind in use and prevents the obese 
luxury known in securer places, where man is cor- 
rupted with peach-houses and terraces and pleached 

94 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

arbours and vast gooseberries guarded under an 
acre of netting. Here the furniture of the garden 
does not encourage a fastidious temper ; there is — 
to say nothing of marbles or fountains — ^hardly so 
much as a box-edging or a yew-hedge: there is 
no definite sign of antiquity, except the four tall 
weather-scarred firs beside the house, and they 
signify, if anything, the original heathy wildness 
of the hillside. The house itself, low and irregular, 
a patching of new on old, hiding its rough-cast 
and tile under a cloak of greenery where the 
conquering ivy grows year by year upon the roses 
and honeysuckle, lends no state to the scene ; it 
is little more than the hut for the sentinel who 
keeps his rounds here season by season against the 
restless besiegers and the still sap of time. There 
is but one short length of wall in the whole garden 
— barely enough for a Noblesse and a Lamarque — 
and under it the cucumber frames, and the early 
border face the south. Here is a fine place for 
look-out and reflection in all seasons when we do 
not hold the sun too cheap. Last week I spent 
a whole morning in it, on one of those spring days 
which we call, with perfectly right instinct, old- 
fashioned — no mere negative truce with dogged 
east winds or seasonable hailstorms, but a blest 
positive in light and warmth and colour, which 
seemed almost too good to be true, and even went 
near to out-facing a dozen of the days of old, 
secure as they seemed in their prescription of 

95 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

memory. On that one day, cuckoo, nightingale, 
and swallow came together, nearly a week before 
their time : all growing things — from the elm-buds 
by the gate to the seed-leaves peeping in the 
borders — had come on with a sudden stride since 
the night before. I had proposed sundry jobs of 
repotting and pricking out, with the lights wide to 
the mild air, but it soon came to sitting on the 
edge of the frame, and considering. 

There was enough to think about in the visible 
world ; the cloud-shadows trailing up the hillsides, 
while the woods gloomed to a massy purple or the 
meadows flushed from green to gold, should have 
been sufficient matter for a reasonable man. The 
rim of the Downs, that quarter-inch strip of pale 
violet air set over the strong painting of the middle 
distance, inasmuch as we know it to mean the five 
hundred feet of chalk hill, the steep grassy scarp of 
the fortress-wall on whose outer face the Channel 
breaks, dominates the whole picture. To-day the 
horizon wears a soft purplish blue like a flower's ; 
to-morrow — if the present signs hold good — it will 
show a film of grey haze, the edge, to a sufficiently 
keen eyesight, engrailed with a running ripple of 
heat. In days when the air is dead still and clear 
for coming rain, the Down seems to come close up 
to the garden bounds, a dun-green bank, hard- 
edged and massive, showing every plane in relief, 
making out every gorse-tuft and chalkpit and 
white track up the Beacon, and the dusty ploughed 

96 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

fields on Its flanks. Add to these dififerences the 
effects of storm, of snow, of sunset on the hills, 
and a man might be content to take such a horizon 
for his park-pale, even for his prison-wall, if it must 
be. And if he should fret even at that limit, there 
is the freedom of the sky, the " flammantia mcenia 
mundi," which shut no one in ; there is the 
inscrutable economy of the cloud-world, its mar- 
shallings and goings to and fro upon the business 
of the earth, its serene purposes and vast unity of 
intent. There is a good deal to be said for the 
man who of choice or necessity makes himself the 
fixed pole of his sphere and lets the vault with its 
vapours and meteors revolve about him. 

On that old-fashioned April day I spoke of, the 
clouds were drawing out of the south, tall-sided 
argosies in lines and squadrons, here and there 
one of the dark keels unloading her treasure in 
drifting streaks upon the shining plain. Presently 
one of the great galleons came driving over the 
valley ; one moment her tops towered dazzlingly 
in the blue overhead ; the next, the gloom and the 
rattling shower were upon us. I took shelter 
under the old yew behind the frame-ground ; and 
while I waited for the sun, which I could guess at by 
a whitening gleam across the rain, I rummaged over 
some corners of recollection — a confused store, safe 
bind, yet anything but safe find — which often 
affords good hunting in idler intervals. I tried to 
recover something of the frame of mind in which 

97 H 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

as a boy I used to receive the coming of spring. 
I am inclined to think that to-day my pleasure in 
the shows of the seasons is stronger than with most 
middle-aged people, more direct and less associa- 
tive ; at any rate, I spend a good deal more time 
than most of my acquaintance in doing nothing in 
the open air : yet the best of to-day's pleasure is 
the merest shadow of the expectancy, the obse- 
quious watching, the revel of the fulfilment of the 
opening year, which I knew before I was twenty. 
It seems wonderful, now, to think how little served 
to kindle the fire ; some still noon, sweet with the 
lilacs in a forecourt at Casehorton, or Sandwell 
glittering through his weed-channels across 
meadow-levels, was enough to put the fever into 
the blood. One spring of all was the crowning 
time ; one that seems, as I look back from this 
dispassionate distance, to have had no black days, 
no wintry returns, to have been altogether made 
up of such weather as this morning's hasty glory. 
Such suns shone then, and leaves budded in such 
heats and such bland airs as time can scarcely 
afford twice in seventy years. It is, I think, a 
special good fortune of mine that this annus 
mirabilis is mixed in memory with the thought of 
school-days. By some odd choice of the associative 
power the holiday outbreaks, the day-long rambles 
in Surrey roughs or chalk-hills, the fishing expedi- 
tions by Sandwell, have lost a great part of the 
magic impress, and rank with the ordinary good 

98 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

hours of other years ; the moments which still 
hold the incommunicable light were spent in 
morning school at Dr. Ransome's. The Doctor 
himself, no doubt, had something to do with it. 
There is no finer poetic justice in the world, and 
not much neater science, than the schoolboy's gift 
of sticking a fatal criticism — perhaps no more than 
a nickname with an irretrievable barb — into the 
one loose joint of the magisterial harness ; but I 
remember no failing we could fasten on, unless it 
were a disproportionate mending of quill pens, a 
daily repair done with a relish of conscious art, 
which began with sharpening the penknife on the 
binding of the great Facciolati while the Doctor 
read the morning Psalms to himself and we looked 
up our Livy or Euripides. We had our encounters 
now and then ; but the fundamental warfare of 
pedagogy, with its occasional awkward truces, was 
in our case inverted. We knew that our Doctor 
was on our side ; we felt that he had not forgotten 
what it is to be a boy, had not taken that draught 
of Lethe without which, under the present con- 
stitution of things, schoolmastering seems barely 
possible. One understands now what at times 
perplexed us then — his sudden attention to a 
venturesome rendering, after a bare patience 
with the decent dictionary work. Spite of the 
way — almost like conjuring — in which he got 
meaning out of the seeming-nonsense chorus-lines, 
there were times when he went back, as I judge, to 

99 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

his own first wrestlings, and we felt that at bottom 
they were nonsense, after all. I remember, in an 
odd way he had of making a sort of musing 
excursus on our construes, as much to himself as 
to us, his contempt for that place in the De Senectute 
which disparages the desire to recall childhood and 
youth in later age. In his own temper he had 
kept the sense, at least, of the early secret ; this 
rarest gift of memory was the lien between us, a 
main part of the spell which fashioned those good 
recollections at school. There was also something 
m the place and the manner of it. The garden 
was the schoolroom all through a time of seraphic 
summer mornings, the work like some more virtu- 
ous holiday. It made no little difference to the 
digestion of our dialogue or our play that they 
came to us with the association not of inked desks 
and map-hung walls, but of waving fields and 
shining skies, the page chequered by the sun 
through the boughs stirred by the south wind, the 
strophes tuned to the sound of bees about the 
flower-plots. Something of the warmth and life of 
those June mornings, when the Doctor heard us 
under the oak that stood between the garden and 
the hayfields, or in more burning hours in the 
black shadow beneath the great cedar on the lawn, 
went into our classics; and something, at least, 
remains. Wet days there were, doubtless, and 
desperate aorists and iron-hearted rectangles to 
balance the good hours ; but their memory is 

100 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

general, sunk into the undistinguished sea of 
young troubles ; by a memorable grace it is the 
serene days which emerge. When September 
mornings left the rime too late for us by the oak 
tree, the study was not so ill a prison-house. 
Through the French windows the landscape was 
there, the lawn, the leafless thickets waiting to 
kindle again with the spring, making backgrounds 
for Medea or Antigone in our work, for Knights of 
the Table and Ladies of Shalott in my private 
excursions from the text before us ; backgrounds 
at times, perhaps, for visions of adventures yet to 
come, conquering returns on some day of sur-. 
passing summer from scholarship-quests or deeds 
of yet higher emprise. Most of our company, I 
think, did not lack in such dreams the image of a 
sovereign lady. I at least owed service to both 
the princesses of the house, the dark and the 
fair, who often afar and sometimes by chance 
encounters in nearer presence shone upon our 
workdays ; first, for a little, I was slave to flaxen- 
haired Lyddy, the blue-eyed fairy of sudden 
friendly smiles ; but soon, and deeply indeed, to 
proud Letty, who held all the Doctor's boys as foes 
of the house, a hateful stone- thro wing, kitten - 
teasing race, to be passed by with high-carried 
head or warred down with terrific scorn of brave 
brown eyes. And even without such alleviations 
as these, the Doctor's study was in itself a friendly 
place : the panelled walls with their black-framed 

lOI 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

Sir Joshua mezzotints, the bookcases topped by 
the Homer bust and the Theseus with his broken- 
nosed inscrutable smile at our Attic efforts, the 
long table, its bottom bar well worn by generations 
of restless boot-heels, the rich atmosphere of the 
Doctor's birdseye over all ; these made up a 
cheerful spell only second to the garden-hours, 
the light which flickered through the oak-boughs, 
the warm south which twirled the pages, and 
sang through the pipe of Pan with all the concert 
of June. 

Before I had got thus far in my reconstitution 
of history, the shower was over and the sun ablaze 
through the drip of the trees. I stood for another 
five minutes under the yew to hear the blackbirds 
break into song as the storm went by, thinking 
how much of all the gloryings of those old springs 
came out of the days that were then to be, kindled 
by a sun yet below the hills. And since now for 
so long a time all the best of April seems to link 
itself with the days behind, I began to explore the 
tract where the change befel, the break between 
that forward and this backward-looking pleasure : 
and I think I could have fixed the time of that 
conversion or catastrophe, if the precision had 
been desirable, within a matter of days. A black- 
bird sang on such a morning as this thirty-some- 
thing years ago, and the praise I gave him was 
mainly for the promises he seemed to make me ; 
to-day the gold-mouthed cheat does but pay me 

102 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

back my own treasure that I gave him when he 
seemed to offer all the world worth the having. 
There is a frame of mind which can take a sort 
of sentimental pleasure in acknowledging a cheat 
like this, which cultivates an actual distaste for 
successes and gains. But it is one which may 
easily lose the wholesome balance of things ; and 
it is good to let the influences of the right April 
days rout the mild-minded melancholy as they 
very well know how. There is no waste ; those 
early transports were not meant only to tickle the 
susceptibilities of leisurely middle age ; they 
screwed up into accord certain strings, we will 
suppose ; the instrument once in tune may be 
laid aside for the present; and when on spring 
mornings the stirring of the new life reaches it 
through windows seasonably wide, some sympa- 
thetic vibration of keynote making response, may 
give forth from the shelf where it lies, echoes of the 
concert in the outer world. 



103 



X 



April 22. 
Yesterday the nightingales began to sing in 
earnest. For a week past a scolding churr as one 
crossed the end of a copse, a few low notes, a sotto 
voce rehearsing of the cadences, when the keen 
wind had dropped in a misty twilight ; the sight, 
even, of the unmistakeable red-brown plumage 
amongst hazel-boughs, told us that they were here. 
But until a restless north-easter, with leaden sky 
and a smoky haze across the valley, had tired out 
its spite and shifted south-westerly, they, with all 
the other wild things, waited and were still. 
Yesterday the change came ; after a night of 
blowing rain we woke to soft southern airs, and the 
breathing warmth which draws all the sweetness 
from the grass and mould. When the sun broke 
out through slow-sailing clouds, the dripping woods 
flushed with a moist heat which brought out the 
bluebells and anemones almost under one's eyes. 
The nightingales took their part in the outbreak 
of pent-up song ; but all day they were scarcely 
to be heard for the hubbub of the tits and finches ; 
and even at the vesper hymn the blackbirds and 

104 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

thrushes sang them down. It was only after dark, 
in the first rich stillness of the night, all balm and 
mildness and content, that they had their hour ; 
there were seven or eight of them, perhaps, within 
earshot, answering each other from copse to copse, 
each in its wonted station, palm-clump or hazel- 
alley, from which the song has pealed every 
spring of the thirty or so within my memory of 
this neighbourhood. 

It has been a habit of mine ever since I was a 
boy, to look out of window at the night, the last 
thing before turning in, to see how the weather 
shapes, where the wind sits, whether the stars are 
right in their courses, before leaving the world to 
go its own gate till morning. At my last look-out 
yesterday the night was starry and clear ; Altair 
in the Eagle hung just clear of the tall elm by the 
garden gate ; and in the budding branches sang 
the nightingale as it has sung on spring nights as 
long as I have known the tree. I believe that, as 
a fact, the numeric bird does come back to the 
same bush and bough during its lifetime ; " Le 
chantre rossignolet," as Ronsard says — 



and again — 



*'. . . vient loger 
Tons les ans en ta ramee," 



*'Gentil rossignol passager 
Qui t'es encor venu loger 
Dedans ceste fraische ramee 
Sur ta branchette accoustumee 
105 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

but that does not greatly matter. The nightingale 
is immortal ; it is nothing to the point to know 
whether the bird that sang here last year fell a 
prey to some grimalkin in Tangier or Fez ; the 
fact stands that the song breaks from the tree 
as punctually as Altair glitters over it. There is 
much matter in this parallel of migration, sugges- 
tions to be slackly followed out, as one leans with 
one's elbows on the window-sill, breathing the 
divine tenderness of the night, kept out of bed by 
that poignant lullaby from the elm-boughs. If 
the little brown bird and the star keep tryst thus, 
what accord of cycle and epicycle may not be pre- 
dicate in our own sphere ? 

Listening to the rich variety of the song, the 
long-drawn stealing fall, the marvellous liquid 
shake, the force in the outburst of keen marteli 
notes, familiar for forty springs, yet year to year 
a still fresh wonder, I felt once more the impression 
of the duration of life which — rather than that of 
its transience — grows upon me as the seasons 
add themselves. We hear more than enough, I 
think, about vicissitude, the mutability of fortune, 
and the like ; little or nothing concerning the 
difficulty (as I see it) in believing that anything 
of the setting and circumstance of our life can ever 
change. In the matter of acquaintance and of 
neighbourhood, my own strand of experience has 
been broken off and knotted on again perhaps as 
much as most men's ; but the trouble which I find 

io6 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

is the keeping one's self awake to the truths of lapse 
and loss under the lulling persuasiveness of those 
immoveable common things that at once shut in 
and sustain our being. I find this difficulty not 
only in the punctuality of constellations and night- 
ingales, but in the most trivial details of one's own 
concerns. I sit in my accustomed place in church 
for so many years, and the chisel-marks on the 
pillar before me— not learned by heart, as it may 
be with some men, in slumbrous Sunday after- 
noons of childhood, but known for a mere broken 
length of later years — seem to assert a fixity for 
which their five centuries* clean-cut graving is only 
a symbol. I make one of my rare visits to town ; 
and, sauntering as my wont is along the line of 
well-remembered daily walks, I find again at a 
certain street corner the rich cosmetic atmosphere, 
the breath of macassar which hung there half a 
life ago, about the very shrine of barberdom, A 
little farther on I stop in a narrow alley before 
a printseller's window ; and lo ! there is the very 
etching of Water Meadows, the reeds, the ragged 
poplars, which used to draw me across the pave- 
ment day by day, a kind of revelation to eyes 
opening somewhat blinkingly on new aspects and 
perspectives of the world. Even in humanity I 
find a sort of stay or arrest of Time's hand, con- 
trary to all the book-rules ; the proportion of my 
acquaintance who " never look a day older " is 
quite a large one. If I go to Oxford, there is 

107 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

always Kelly in the lodge — red, Irish, military, 
clean as a new banknote, enormously respectable : 
there is the Dean, crossing the street, small, 
shrivelled, with the historic shepherd's -plaid 
trousers, and the top hat on the back of his head, 
his soul browsing in the Anthology, the musing 
eyes focussed now and then with an effort on such 
outer phenomena as tramcars or bicycles. Neither 
he nor Kelly shows a wrinkle the more ; and it is 
a surprise which I never quite get rid of, that 
neither Dean nor Porter sees in me the down- 
chinned, raw-boned undergraduate of a mere 
hundred terms or so since. The negative instances 
which occur somehow fail to produce a propor- 
tionate effect. Hicks the Bursar's once raven 
beard is now nearly white ; but that is a mere 
accident of matter : one is assured that Hicks's 
lectures on political economy have suffered no 
change. And the Master has certainly been dead 
these three or four gaudies ; one reads the gilt 
lettering, already a little tarnished, on his marble 
in the ante-chapel, but with a mind that does not 
fix itself on the subject. As I said, it seems that 
in these matters it is only the positive phenomena 
which have weight. I will not insist that this way 
of looking at the world may not spring from a 
congenital twist of the perceptions, and I will grant 
that the ultimate catastrophe may be all the more 
impressive for a lifelong obstination in the con- 
trary sense ; but I honestly think that as a rule 

io8 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

we allow too little for the effect of the security 
bred in us by a view of life's continuity. I came 
the other day on the chapter in Seneca which 
moralises about the burning of Lugdunum, with all 
its marshalling of the vicissitudes of existence, 
like a schoolboy's essay. It would be some solace, 
he says, for the briefness and feebleness of our days, 
if things decayed as slowly as they are matured ; 
as it is, increase is laboriously wrought out, but all 
things haste towards extinction. It depends, per- 
haps, very much upon the point of view. I once 
found on a tree in an old orchard, clear and 
strong, expanded to a sort of grotesque emphasis, 
the initials which I hacked out in some couple of 
minutes' playtime when I was at school. In the 
same way, a single breath serves for half a dozen 
words which sting the heart without pity after 
fifty years' repentance. Of course, when the Stoic 
goes on to reckon up exile and torture along with 
sickness, war and shipwreck, as common chances 
of life, we must admit he has an argument which 
we have lost. Perhaps we do not generally give 
all their due to those old Romans who so seldom 
died in their beds : one may speculate, in passing, 
what differences it might make in the public men 
of our day if the dissolution of a ministry involved 
that of its members, and if their ultimate pro- 
bability were poison instead of peerages. But 
Seneca's tale of wrecks, burnings, earthquakes, 
floods — he died, be it noted, some fourteen years 

109 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

before the catastrophe of Pompeii — can hardly 
have had much more weight in Italy in his day 
than it would have in England now. It is the 
very ratio of such discrimina rertim to the common 
tenor of the world, which makes for that lulling 
security of daily life. And perhaps — to vent an 
old spite of mine on the race of most compendious 
liars which the world has ever seen — it is the very 
insistence of the common type of moralists on the 
transience of things which is answerable for the 
recoil towards too large a faith in their stability. 
" Nil privatim, nil publice stabile est," says the 
philosopher ; and we deliberately stiffen our trust 
in Greenwich time, the Bank of England, and the 
like fixities of the universe. In all things, says 
the philosopher, we are to look before us and 
excogitate not what usually happens, but what 
may possibly come to pass. It is a precept whose 
observance might save us a good deal of trouble ; 
and as I turn away at last from the window, I con- 
sider that before the circle is complete again this 
time next year, Altair may have exploded upon 
space, and the whole race of nightingales may 
have died of broken heart. But that injunction 
does not make sufficient allowance for the force of 
common life, a lulling enchantment beyond any 
that philosophy knows. It would be nearer the 
mark to insist on the continuance of life about us 
and our own transience amongst it; to think of 
ourselves as held a moment in the vortex of the 

no 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

spinning orb, and then flung out at a tangent, as 
alive this spring in every nerve to the pulse of the 
white fire and the thrill of the voice in the dark, 
in a few more Aprils taken away from the coming 
together of the star and the bird. As I left the 
window, there came something of a rebellion I 
have felt before at such seeming disproportion of 
sentiment, a pathos with something like a touch 
of jealousy in it, a new meaning to " still wouldst 
thou sing, and I have ears in vain " — only to be 
borne by the help of an old surmise that such 
puttings-forth of beauty as these, the things which 
at every turn we must look at and listen to and 
leave with a helpless pang, are but the last vibra- 
tion of the central light ; the belief, or the will to 
believe, that all the good and fair things which our 
life ever and again presents, half-shown and with- 
drawn while scarcely grasped, all the broken 
lights, the suspensions and discords are but slight 
motions of the reality about us, felt as the world is 
felt by the first momentary sallies of the child's 
perception — vague pictures, as in a dream, with 
long interspaces of nothingness. There is a way 
in which we may think of these intuitions as at 
once fantasy and truth : a way figured by the 
chance of a dream I had at nightingale-time last 
year. In that last strange state, when the dream 
thins away like morning mist before the quicken- 
ing warmth of life, and for a moment we hang 
somewhere between two worlds, I thought I was 

III 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

in a rich Eastern garden, listening to the night- 
ingale among blossomed thickets, and watching a 
point of light which shone from the top of a vast, 
shadowy building — mosque or dome, divined rather 
than seen amongst black groves of cedar. This 
light had a pulsation in its flame, which seemed 
to keep time with the throb of the pealing voice ; 
connected with it (as I said to myself, with the 
fantastic precision of words we sometimes find 
in dreams), by some strange relation of a cycle 
of rhythms. Then, as the slowly clearing mind 
came awake and felt, so to say, for its bearings in 
the world of sense again, the dark corners of the 
room and the faintly glimmering square of the 
window, there was the matter which the half- 
quickened fancy had wrought upon : the star 
hung glittering over the dark mass of the elm, 
and the song pealing from its boughs had at once 
broken and avouched the dream. 



112 



XI 



May 12. 
I TOOK the Warden with me lately in one of my 
cross-country walks, seven miles by field-path and 
wood, gate and stile, without a step on the high- 
road. In the days of my youth I tramped the 
highways to some purpose ; I have the Ordnance 
map of more than one county, on which the red- 
inked record of travelled roads makes a pretty 
close network. But altered conditions of traffic 
have turned me off the Macadam and into the 
fields ; and thus late do I begin to discover the 
full charm of the innumerable tracks and paths in 
which a man can saunter and muse if he will, 
unvexed by dust-clouds and the rules of the road. 
I am already coming to regard the highway, when 
I chance on it in my rambles, as " pays suspect " 
much as do the wild things, stoat or rabbit, looking 
cautiously up and down it, and scuttling across it 
into the safe covert of the green depths on either 
hand. The brooding quiet of some woodland 
hollow is all the deeper for the noises which 
faintly reach it from the London road, the howl 
of flying gears, the hoarse quack as of some great 
obscene bird, 

113 1 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

The way I took led through a succession of 
copses, some of which had been cleared this 
spring of their underwood. The Warden was 
for grumbling at the destruction ; and at first 
sight the bald slopes of trodden ground, with 
hardly a primrose to grace them, littered with 
twigs, and rough with the hacked stubs, con- 
trasted unhappily enough with the untouched 
thicket, where the hyacinths clothed the ground 
with living blue — a sapphire with a greenish under- 
play — and the galaxies of the stellaria shone along 
the banks. But, as I told the Warden, it is pre- 
cisely to the rigid system of periodical clearing 
that we owe the incomparable beauty of our 
sylvan springs. Where a wood has been left to 
itself for thirty years, the explorer, if he can force 
his way through the thicket, will find the ground 
bare and dead, all growth stifled by the green roof 
overhead. But when the woodmen have lopped 
the glades, and have thinned the larger timber 
in places, even the first year there is a flush of 
life that has lain dormant there, trails of ground- 
ivy and spurges uncurling ; the second year the 
primroses have lodged themselves all over the 
cleared ground ; the third spring they are in their 
glory ; and before the stubs of the underwood have 
sprouted again to more than a spare covert, the 
bluebells have run together from groups and 
scatterings here and there to isles and continents 
of heavenly colour. Just for the moment, when 

114 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

one finds the billhook levelling a favourite shaw 
and opening the secret alleys to the common day 
one grudges the change, and says something to 
one's self of the hccum ligna kind ; but when one has 
seen this harvest of the woods, the cycle of growth, 
and clearance at work for the best part of a lifetime, 
and observed the delight of Nature in clothing the 
fresh ground, and all her degrees of changing 
beauty till the copse stands thick and green again, 
one recognises the woodman as no mean artist, 
and feels how intimately human handiwork has 
become part of the most characteristic English 
landscape. 

In Horse Wood we found John Board, a here- 
ditary billman, and his mate busy among the 
underwood, beside their rough-built shelter with 
all their tackle about them — stick-faggots, ether- 
boughs, thatching-rods, cleft oak for wattles. The 
fire under the kettle sent a drift of blue haze across 
the clearing, and the two men were just ready to 
knock off for dinner. Their life is astonishingly 
simple and archaic, and one of the wholesomest in 
the world ; dry-shod in dead leaves and fern while 
the ploughman splashes along the drenched fur- 
rows, snug by the stick fire in the lew hollow while 
the snow-wind nips the shepherd on the down, 
these " leather-legged chaps," the " clay and coppice 
people," as Cobbett called them, are still, as they 
were at the time of the " Rural Rides," most 
favoured of all who live on the land. The billhook 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

IS almost the only tool they need ; a felling-axe 
may be wanted for the larger saplings, and a draw- 
knife for shaving the thatching-rods ; the wood 
itself furnishes all the rest : chopping-blocks, levers, 
wedges, bonds for the faggots, are all made as they 
are wanted from the material everywhere lying at 
hand ; the little " lodge " or shed for rough 
weather is built of faggots and thatched with hoop- 
shavings. Nothing is wasted ; the very chips and 
litter make the fire over which the kettle sings, 
hung on a handy hazel crook stuck into the 
ground. 

We sat a few minutes on a pile of faggots to 
pass the time of day with John Board, a small, 
shrivelled greybeard, keen-eyed, spry to the last 
degree, tongue-free, the captain of all woodcutting 
hereabouts. His mate, Luke Holman, a heavy- 
shouldered giant, taciturn and impenetrable, tended 
the fire with his back towards the conversation. 
In the upper wood a number of sizeable oaks had 
been " thrown and flawed," and the men had been 
busy putting up the dried bark into bundles. 
Chichester, or Horsham, it was going to, said old 
John ; he didn't know which ; it was the same 
man had the tanyard at both on 'em. How was 
the bark selling ? Why, better than what it was a 
year' — two ago ; they seemed to reckon as they 
couldn't do without it, after all. It wasn't any- 
thing like what he could remember, but better 
than what it was the last time they was throwing 

ii6 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

in Horse Wood ; then they didn't flaw anythhig 
smaller than your wrist, but now you'd got to go 
middling far up the spray. 

The Warden asks if old John knows where the 
leather goes to when it comes out of the tanyard ? 
Old John shakes his head : London, he *spects 
. . . mos' things goes to London now. And not 
so long ago, the Warden asks, there were tanyards 
in almost every village ? There was that, replies 
the woodman : he could recollect them working at 
Arn'ton and Shern'am up till 'sixty, pretty near. 

" And you could know where your leather came 
from then, and could know that it was leather ? " 
asks the Warden again, looking meditatively at a 
cracked boot-upper. Oh, ay, there wasn't much 
of this here truck that rots as soon as ye starts 
wearing of it ; 'twas all oak-bark then. And he 
'spects people can get it now — them as reckons to 
have good stuff. The Warden nods reflectively : 
" them as reckons to have good stuff," he murmurs 
to himself, as a fruitful summary of the whole 
matter. We left the woodmen to their refection, 
earned as not many lunches are earned, taken in 
serene leisure, after a rub on the corduroys of the 
palms scored and blackened from the hazel bond, 
in the snug lee of the faggot pile, with the boot- 
heels stretched luxuriously into the hyacinth carpet, 
with the sunlit woods misting drowsily through the 
blue haze from the fire. In the upper wood we 
found havock to dismay at first sight even a man 

117 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

used to the woodland economy. A score of oaks 
were down, the flayed trunks thrown pell-mell 
among the trampled anemones, the lopped spray, 
which was already in yellow leaf, withering in 
shattered confusion all about. Some of the fallen 
were but timber — trees of the crowd, mere sixty- 
foot masts, with a head of boughs at the top 
fighting for light and air ; but there were two or 
three on the edge of the wood with characters of 
their own, that had been a sort of landmarks in 
my walks, the pattern of whose ivy-trails and the 
grey wrinklings of whose boles had printed them- 
selves on my memory in a thousand conjunctions 
of varying mood and weather. Worst of all, just 
beyond the wood, there was a sudden gap that 
struck the mind with something of the rebellious 
grief proper to graver losses. The noble tree 
which crowned the knoll beyond the wood, spread- 
ing his boughs twenty yards into the cornfield on 
the one side, and thrusting back the thicket as far 
behind him, the honoured friend whose stately 
strength I have stood to look at summer and 
winter — the mighty muscle of the bared limbs or 
the dome of massy leafage whose outline the 
perfect prime of age had brought to the full semi- 
circle — lies shattered and dinted into the clay 
among the springing wheat. Every time I went 
by him I used to make an inward salutation to 
his absolute fulfilment of the function of a tree, 
with a back-handed reference, perhaps, to some 

Ii8 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

prevalent standards of human completeness. As 
we stood by the great sawn butt, as high as a 
man's shoulder, the Warden counted the rings 
of the grain — two hundred and eighty, if the axe 
had not robbed him of some years at the edge — 
and made a rough calculation of the feet of timber 
in the trunk. I found myself wondering what I 
would give, over and above the price he will fetch 
in the woodyard, to have him up and green once 
more, and saying that it would be a long time 
before I care to take my walk through Horse 
Wood again. 

As it happened, I found myself there only a 
night or two afterwards, and sat for half an hour 
on a bough of the fallen giant, with a score of his 
fellows glimmering about me in the dusk on the 
flower-strewn slope, and the clean raw smell of 
the oak sap filling all the air. I had nodded and 
roused myself once or twice, when all at once 
I saw the souls of the trees, the Dryads, gathered 
together in a company, coming down the wood- 
men's path, sighing as they came with a thin echo 
of their old tree-top music and pacing slowly 
amongst their shattered boughs. They were 
shepherded by Hermes, who bore a felling-axe 
in place of his wand. At the brow where the 
path drops steeply to the sallow-grown bottoms 
of the wood, they met with Pan, who seemed to 
complain of the wrong done to his realm and the 
exile of his people. " That I have charge to bring 

119 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

them over Styx is true," I heard Hermes say ; 
"but shall there not be oaks in the under- world, 
and souls to inhabit them sufficient for the wood- 
lands of the blest ? Doth not Jove take thus at 
their season the tree, and the hyacinths beneath 
it, and the grass, so that there may be no lack 
of shade there, nor of soft lying, nor of garlands 
for those who rest ? These, and many another sort 
of good things beside I convey from men's sight 
into the darkness ; or how should they, when they 
have been ferried over, find all that the poets told 
them should be there? And so, fair son, let 
me on with my flock." 

With that he passed on, and when I rubbed 
my eyes and looked after them, there was nothing 
there but a wreath of mist rising from the hidden 
turns of the brook, and no sound but the cry of 
the plover from the fallow beyond the wood. I 
left the lopped trunk and the litter of withering 
leaves, pleasing myself with the fancy that some- 
where the soul of the tree was budding freshly, 
and the well-remembered shadow was falling 
across the wood-violets and anemones in the light 
of a fairer sky. 



120 



XII 

June 24. 
When I called at Burntoak Farm last week for a 
talk with Mrs. Ventom, I found her making tea for 
Lady Anne in the kitchen. Such a conjunction of 
feminine capability is a memorable thing, if a little 
arduous, for the chance-comer to the feast. It is 
rather as if an honest Boeotian, going to pay a call 
at the Delphic shrine, had found the Sibyl enter- 
taining her colleague of Cumae. Both the ladies 
are most serenely and practicably wise in their 
several ways, and I always maintain that Lady 
Anne might, with great profit to her neighbours, 
take over the whole law-business of this circuit, 
while Mrs. Ventom's judgment should certainly 
supersede the present form and matter of our 
County Council. But, like some exceptional 
voices, their gifts seem formed to mix their 
high and low together in concert : they inspire 
each other when they confer. If they would but 
put their heads together about their country's 
government, I protest that a week's specimen 
of their management would be enough to sweep 
away the tangle of impersonal enactment and 

121 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

impossible persons, and to upset the whole con- 
catenation, from the calamitous Tom Gates with 
his tipsy vote, up to the public-spirited gentlemen 
who form the summit of the dear device. But 
what hope is there of any such devolution, when 
the inspiration of the Sibyls springs entirely from 
the religion of minding the business that lies next 
at hand? 

Mrs. Ventom has not learned to concede the 
modern whimsy of meals out-of-doors. A garden 
is very well at proper times, she holds ; but it was 
not made to eat in ; and if she abhors one manner 
of eating, it is what she calls "tea in her lap." I 
found the great kitchen, with its black oak ceiling 
and stone floor, pleasantly cool and dark after the 
glaring dust of Plash Lane in its summer guise. 
The table, with its historic damask got-up as Mrs, 
Ventom knows how, with its ample provision — the 
butter, the cream, the honey, the jams, the cakes, 
all answering her inexorable standard of home- 
made perfection — was a lesson in forgotten arts. 
Both door and windows stood wide, and through 
them we looked out on the sunlit greenery of the 
garden. Mrs. Ventom, as becomes the mistress of 
three hundred acres, and a power in the parish, is 
rather contemptuous towards the house-piece, the 
twenty rods or so allotted to such mere luxuries as 
gooseberries or shallots ; none the less, the green- 
stuff flourishes beyond the ordinary, and the 
flowers — seemingly chance-set among the worts 

122 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

in the old way, a vast lavender bush, a rose 
hollyhock, a tuft of white pinks — fit into their 
places and come into the picture in a fashion 
missed by some more painful gardeners' designs. 
Such graces as these are kept in their places by 
sound utilities ; a midsummer hatch of white 
Dorkings scratches about the pinks, and the 
flagged path between the box borders and the 
lavender is lined with rows of cream-pans, glitter- 
ing dazzlingly in the afternoon sun. 

My arrival only suspended for a minute or two 
a discussion of intimate domestic affairs, as lively 
and actual as only a couple of really strong-headed 
women can make it ; and while I heard the counts 
of the indictment against Hetty Dawes the kitchen- 
maid, I compared, as I have done at other times, 
the looks and ways of the two wise women, the 
bailiff's widow and the earl's daughter, so curiously 
alike through their differences, and thought what 
an education the pair might afford to some simple 
propounders of equality, in the science, hardly yet 
conceived of, of levelling or fitting in. The perfect 
understanding of positions and absolute ease in 
them, the immunities of half a life's friendship, 
the fine intuitions by which the lesser lady 
derogated and the greater assumed, might have 
taught a new category of ideas to all that painful 
world which for ever scrambles and kicks to keep 
its own head at the heaven-appointed altitude in 
the scale of creation. In the matter of looks, the 

123 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

mistress of the farm, no doubt, carries it easily at 
first sight. She is one of those rare people whose 
dressing seems an inevitable part of themselves, 
and no mere appendage, as pleasantly characteristic 
as the wholesome complexion or the springy gait ; 
whether one view her in her dairying print and 
apron, or in her church-going black silk, one pro- 
nounces that nothing more is wanted, that the 
alert, well-turned figure, the fine hands — proof, 
it seems, against the rasp of house-work — the 
smooth brown hair, the clear colour in the spare, 
rather high-boned cheeks, could not possibly look 
better in any sort of tire but the one that is on. 
Whereas Lady Anne's old black mushroom hat, 
her quaint home-made jacket, with its business- 
like pockets, the darned gloves of her country 
walks are an effectual disguise. She has grown 
stouter of late years, and her face, seen in side- 
view, with half-drooped eyelid and sunken chin, 
sometimes looks a little heavy and inert: her 
white hair is apt, in the ordinary course, to stray 
rather disorderly. But one has only to listen to 
her voice, to get a look from the light blue eyes, a 
look for the most part one of serene appraisement, 
but sometimes lit with an imperious fire, in order 
to understand all that is told of the place she held 
in London before she lost her son and withdrew 
from the world at thirty. There is, I think, some 
bond between her and Mrs. Ventom, which had 
its beginning in that time ; they were together, I 

124 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

imagine, when the catastrophe happened, nearly 
forty years ago, and out of the trouble grew one 
of those understandings which are the closer and 
more lasting for their being rarely or never 
expressed in words. 

The delinquency of Hetty Dawes was the 
main strand of the talk on this occasion. There 
was, indeed, a somewhat perfunctory attempt to 
bring in on my behalf the weather and the 
prospects of the gooseberry crop, but I have 
managed to acquire with my acquaintance the 
character of a general philosopher, who can see 
his own affair in the greater part of other people's 
subjects ; and presently, without much apology, 
we came round to the little kitchen-maid again. 
To outward view Hetty is almost pretty, ac- 
cording to our not very exacting standard, 
with the casual prettiness of colour and ways of 
looking and smiling, which just carries off the 
slack-knit frame and blunted features of the race. 
As to her ghostly part, she is just one more of 
those heartbreaking little nonentities which we 
breed in such multitudinous uniformity. She 
seems to have nothing about her so positive as 
either vices or virtues, her mistress says ; it is 
doubtful whether she has any innate motions at 
all, except perhaps an instinctive power of dodging 
work and a propensity, leisurely, but one that 
arrives, towards amusement gratis. Three years' 
drill at Burntoak having made her really useful 

125 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

at due range of tether, she gives notice, not 
altogether unexpectedly. No, she has nothing 
to complain of; she doesn't want to be recom- 
mended to any one, thank you ; she has heard 
of a place in Bayswater, and has written to the 
lady. And she had only turned her hair up a 
month before ! They always go like that then : 
there must be actually something in the operation 
which affects the brain, Mrs. Ventom thinks, 
meditating the drift of a long and strenuous 
experience of scullery-maids. 

" It wasn't Always so, Lucy," says Lady Anne. 
"You'll remember Jane Burtenshaw " 

"Yes, and Polly Knight," replies the widow; "they 
were made differently, somehow, then. Jenny 
couldn't read a line, and Polly could but write 
her name. It's education that does it, my lady." 

"Oh, Lucy!" cries Lady Anne, with a grave 
shake of the head, rallying to the conventions in 
countercheck to Mrs. Ventom's more sweeping 
iconoclasm. 

"Well, what they call education, my lady. If 
the schooling they get was made or meant for 
country-folk, it would be another thing. You'll 
remember the inspector last year, who wanted us 
to plant roses on the north side of the schoolhouse, 
and made all the children laugh with his question 
about swedes. And there's poor Dempster who 
went out naturalising and caught a cockchafer, 
and wanted to argue against the whole school that 

126 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

ft was something else. It's Londoners teaching 
the children to be Londoners all through ; and 
then they wonder why they want to leave the 
country and go into the towns." 

"But there's been a good deal of improvement 
lately," says Lady Anne, still showing a gravity 
which I suspect as slightly beyond the needs of 
the case ; " they have actually been talking about 
teaching field-work and house-work." 

"And who's to do the teaching?" asks Mrs. 
Ventom, smiling at some vision, perhaps, of certain 
top-hatted visitors she knows, over their boots in 
her ten-acre in January. " They don't even know 
the outside of their own business yet, with all their 
talk about the science of teaching ; pouring stuff 
out of a spout is all they can think of. . . • If 
they'd ever had to fatten ducks, now," she goes on 
meditatively, " they'd have learnt that there's some 
hold more than others. But it's all straight out 
of the books. They don't seem to reckon," con- 
cludes Mrs. Ventom, with an analogy after her 
wont, " that you can put a fire out with coal." 

"But about Hetty," Lady Anne began again, 
going back to an old prejudice of hers ; "we might 
have found her a good place somewhere in the 
country, Lucy. You say she has never been out of 
Sheringham yet ; she's a mere child, and London's 
a terrible place. Surely, if you'd used a little 
authority " 

Mrs. Ventom shook her head. "People must 

127 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

learn," was all she would say ; " learn and find out 
for themselves." 

Just then Hetty herself came into sight, busy 
about the milk-pans along the box hedge, and 
both the judges turned to look at her, out in the 
clear light of the garden, and I looked at the 
judges. The two faces offered a curious contrast 
of expression. Lady Anne's was solicitous and 
very tender, as she watched the little busy head 
with its new-learned vanity of flaxen top-knot ; 
Mrs. Ventom's meaning, as she repeated her 
formula, " They've got to learn, my lady," was not 
so easy to interpret; but I thought that I saw 
underneath the hardness a deeper care even than 
Lady Anne's, the tenderness which has learned not 
to fight against the strangeness of the ways of life, 
knows something of the cost lit cannot pay, the 
things that must be let alone for ever. 

The unconscious culprit finished her tidying 
up by the box hedge, and the court went back 
to the consideration of causes again. None of 
us — our memories being of about the same span, 
and, I think, agreeing to a considerable extent 
in a selective turn — had any need to go beyond 
the obvious post hoc of the schools. Once more 
Mrs. Ventom fixes, with her own homely illustra- 
tions, on the nerveless, slack-sinewed methods of 
the educational hierarchy, the want of mother-wit 
and grasp of the rude elements of life. They 
have shut themselves up in a dead world of tlieir 

128 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

own till, in matters of plain sense, they are stupider 
than the dullest child they set up to teach. " I've 
never come across a master yet," she says, " nor 
an inspector either, for that matter, who remem- 
bered that what you put first into a box when 
you're packing it, comes out last. But it makes 
a difference, when you want to get at the things. 
Not that there's anything in most of them, when 
you do get them open." 

And with that she began to tie her bonnet 
strings — the signal of dismissal — and made ready 
to see Lady Anne back to the highroad. I took 
my way home round by Nyman's Corner, and 
chancing on the outrush of the children coming 
out of school, had opportunity to observe the 
prevalence of pale faces and dull looks and 
undeveloped frames — a strange alteration, within 
my recollection, from the sun-bleached heads, the 
walnut complexions, the stout little anatomies, 
checked by the very abundance of exercise in 
light and air, but prompt to shoot up and 
broaden at the due season, which were to be seen 
before we had learned to imprison the forming- 
age for the best part of the day within stuffy 
walls, at best nurseries of dirt and sickness, 
sometimes — as Nyman's Corner taught us but last 
summer — deadly with bungled drains. We were 
never, I judge, at any time a particularly well- 
favoured race hereabouts ; yet the red cheeks and 
clear eyes to be seen among the outliers of the 

129 K 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

farms, if not in the purlieus of the village, used 
to carry it off pretty well. Nowadays the mis- 
featured faces and shapeless heads get no help 
from the blessed sun and wind ; our skins are 
bleached, our legs are atrophied, our chests con- 
tracted, in order that our souls may take the like- 
ness — ^just heavens! — the likeness of the soul of 
Dempster and his kind. 

As I shook off the little crowd, and got out of 
range of their cheerful noise — and alack ! of their 
appeal to another sense — I overtook the Warden, 
and walked with him as far as the head of the 
street, propounding some of the doubts which I 
had been entertaining, and finding him, in his 
positive, unhesitating way, full of the same subject. 
That aura which I had passed through had 
evidently reached his nose ; there was at least one 
uniform product of the system always to be had : 
for the manufacture of froust trust the elementary 
schools! Some day it would, of course, strike 
people that education might include learning to 
wash. I got the Warden to give me the text of a 
place in Xenophon that was in my head, about 
the occupations which compel people KaOriaOai koI 
cTKiaTpa^H(jdaiy to sit indoors and live out of the 
sun ; and he reminded me of some more sound 
remarks in the passage, how that people reared 
under those conditions are not much use to their 
friends, and make poor defenders of their country. 
" And we shan't mend that," says the Warden, 

130 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

" by having a drill-sergeant for them once a week. 
Oh, the imbecile wiseacres of authorities, who just 
begin to have a glimmering that the body counts 
for something, and talk about school-dinners ! 
We shall have to get back to Plato, and make 
Asklepios a politician, before we can give the 
poor little wretches a chance.'* 

I quoted some of Mrs. Ventom's dicta about the 
personnel of the system. " Ay," says the Warden, 
" the head that woman has ! They've got the 
wrong men everywhere. Take the committee ; 
think of our good Sims-Bigg, and Billy Hicks the 
educationalist ! And then all those bloodsuckers 
in the departments — don't you know the type? — 
sweating Firsts in History like Chepmell and 
Blagden and Poppleton — with their annual increase 
and pensions, and their seventy-pound houses at 
Bromley or Muswell Hill — damned souls from the 
day they began to spell. One might get over 
them, though, or put up with them ; it's the Heads 
and the Parliament men that make one absolutely 
hopeless : they must know better, one thinks. Old 
Herder — he comes to see me generally when he's 
over from Bonn — insists it's simply a plan of the 
powerful to Helotise the lower orders for their own 
ends ; and, on my word, it looks uncommonly like 
it. Of course the Radicals would be sentimental 
fools enough to play into the hands of the con- 
spirators, thinking we're going to have the Millen- 
nium that way. The fool or rogue dilemma comes 

131 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

in somehow. People like our Billy, and even like 
Chepmell, perhaps really believe in themselves. 
There's some hope of a man like Chepmell, who is 
suddenly illuminated after twenty years in the 
office, and discovers that it is a life and death 
matter to interest the children in the land. Not 
the slightest distrust of themselves for having been 
wrong for half a lifetime ; they start gaily on the 
new tack, more convinced of their infallibility than 
ever. But the politicians ! — well, you know where 
I think their illumination comes from : * darkness 
visible,' eh?" 

To all this I nodded my head and agreed, as I 
hope a wise man may, feeling the satisfaction of 
hearing some one else go further than one's own 
proprieties would quite concede, and getting, like 
Panurge with his page, one's cursing done by 
proxy. When I bade the Warden good night at 
the Almshouse gate, we were agreed that there could 
be no beginning of real elementary education in 
the country till the whole of the present ghastly 
simulacrum was swept out of the way, and the 
hands of Billy Hicks and Dempster and Chepmell 
put to some less momentous business than shaping 
the destiny of the race. As I climbed the hill 
homewards I mused what sort of account little 
Hetty Dawes would present against those busy 
traffickers, in the great final clearing-house of debts 
and credits, whose existence is one of the most 
consolatory of my private and supplementary tenets, 

132 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

I was at Burntoak again yesterday afternoon, 
and found that Hetty's term was up, and that she 
was to leave by the next morning's carrier. On 
my way through the village I had met Mrs. Sims- 
Bigg, home for a few days from the whirl of the 
season in town. There was no resisting or escap- 
ing her ; town was such a change ; everybody 
wanted a change ; / wanted a change, most 
decidedly : the country was all right in August, 
and for a Sunday — now and then ; but really to 
appreciate it, one must be back in Kensington 
again. I must come up and rub the rust off a 
bit ; a year in the country made people positively 
mouldy. Under this sort of education I scuffled 
along deprecatingly, as I have seen a small boy 
reluctant, ear-led by domestic law ; and only when 
the irresistible lady had gone, shrieking to me 
through the noise of her carriage-wheels the 
address of some Brompton lodgings, which I was 
to engage at once, did I think of all the neat 
remarks with which I should have defied her. I 
carried on something of these reflections while I 
sat in Mrs. Ventom's kitchen, and watched Hetty 
Dawes rinse her cream-pans for the last time at 
Burntoak. I thought of the gasping nights and 
the garish mornings when nose and eyes take the 
whirling dust and manure at the gusty corners, of 
the burden of the omnibuses going by from light 
to dark at the next turning, of the horizon of 
chimney-pots and sooty spires : of all this matched 

133 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

against the hourly alteration of beauty which will 
grow in these solitudes between this and Good- 
wood. Who shall blame Hetty for her venture 
into the unknown glories of Bayswater, if our 
accomplished and informed Mrs. Sims-Bigg, an 
instance of nice balance between intellect and 
propriety, wilfully prefers Cromwell Road in May 
to her own bluebell woods, the nightly crush to 
the breathings of the dusk across the Sussex 
lawns ? 

Hetty has finished her day's labours in good 

time : she has packed her box in a flutter of awful 

joy, I conjecture, at the Paradise in view ; but as 

I sit by the open door of the kitchen in the first of 

the twilight, I see her go down the garden, and 

gather a bunch of flowers to take v/ith her 

to-morrow, something of the country to have near 

her when there will be no more mossy paths to 

walk in between the daisy edging and the tall 

striped tulips, in the air heavy with the smell of 

the Brompton stocks and the syringa. Ah, Hetty, 

the change is swift ! Before the country posy shall 

have altogether faded in your little attic among 

the chimney-pots, a spell will begin to work ; soon 

after the dust-cart has received its relics, the 

country will be dying out of your heart, never to 

return, or perhaps, perhaps to return only as the 

saddest of ghosts, which you would give the world 

to forget. Before the plane trees in your square 

shall have cast their sooty skins again you shall be 

134 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

Cockney from the sole of your shoes to the top- 
most curl of your tousled locks ; but never shall 
your small spirit, that leaves these meadows, God 
knows, country-clean, cast off the smutch of the 
smoke once taken. You will not turn back, out of 
all the thousands that have gone that road. You 
will forget the fields, the silent hillsides, the vast 
calm of evening upon the garden where the stocks 
and the syringa grew. 



135 



XIII 

June 28. 
If there are days when an idle man feels con- 
vincingly the reproach of his empty hands, and 
knows that he is left in a backward eddy while the 
main stream of the world's business goes by, there 
are others which lull him with the notion of a 
vaster process, the set of a master-current sweeping 
alike intents and achievements, the active and the 
folded hands towards the unguessed deeps. The 
passive sentiment is naturally stronger as middle 
age draws towards the outer mark ; as youth 
recedes and our trace lengthens behind us, we 
think it easier to produce the line of motion, and 
to make some guess at points to be passed through 
in the shorter tract that remains. For this reason, 
among others, the past becomes a thing of more 
and more consequence to our scheme of things as 
the years shorten. In my own case, the hours 
which seem to justify the otiose attitude are, for 
the most part, touched with an indolent melancholy 
of remembrance and an anticipatory emotion, a 
sort of proleptic pathos only relevant if the line of 

136 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

motion already described may be understood as 
producible beyond a given point. 

The motions of the mind respond, I believe, 
more readily to the influence of hours and weather 
and seasons of the year than we generally conceive. 
The days when I bask wholly conscience-clean in 
the tide of pensive idleness are the first two or 
three of summer warmth, vivid and pure after rain, 
with their stores of sweet air and moisture un- 
touched. After a cloudless week in June, the 
earth is sunburned and staled, the sky smirched with 
grey haze and close airs. When dry heat increases 
day by day, when leaves wilt and cattle lie close in 
the shade, and the landscape seems to endure, 
waiting for the truce of the dusk ; then the delicate 
spell is gone, time seems to drive on furiously, 
and there is no place for dreams of august rhythms 
which gather one's own dilatory paces into their 
scheme. During those serene days of early 
summer, I find in the light which glitters or sleeps 
soft, in the stir or pause of leaves, even in the 
coming and going of moist earthy smells from 
flag-grown edges of the pond, an intention, an 
expressive spirit connected with all the old June 
days of this fashion which I can remember. In 
my sessions under the beech-tree shade, my mind 
retraces with a curious sagacity past hours of the 
like light and weather, and presents in an astonish- 
ingly vivid and actual setting the very motion of 
thoughts which came some sunny noon twenty or 

137 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

thirty years ago. There seems to be no dis- 
coverable method or sequence in the phantasma- 
goria ; it may be that some hint from a drowsing 
sense, a precise degree of contrast between grey- 
green foliage and grey-blue sky, or that insistent 
smell from the pond-flags stirs some particular 
store of memory ; but in general there is no trace- 
able reason in mechanics for the selection of 
scenes. Why, to-day, should I see a line of tall, 
ragged poplars, a composition whose awkward 
regularity still vaguely irks the mind, beyond a 
broad reach of shining river, with an eyot white 
with meadow-sweet, and a boat drifting between 
the sedge-beds of a side channel with lazily 
dipping oars, its varnish flashing to the sun, the 
red parasol in the stern an outrageous spot of 
colour on the low greens of the river valley ? I 
recall my solemn scorn of that irresponsible ark, as 
I recall my envy of the mowers swinging in line 
through the bronze green of the meadows beyond 
the stream. Is it the smell of the hay now making 
in the field below the garden which brings for the 
next vision a meadow where I did work, both with 
scythe and fork, and yet did not find any consider- 
able peace of mind ? I see again, clearer than the 
impressions of yesterday, the expanse of gold- 
green under the overflowing sunlight, ridged with 
the grey windrows, shut in by a line of dark elms, 
and against their darkness the rose of a girl's face, 
half the field away, watched with jealous devotion, 

138 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

with a boy's desperate caring that was torn by 
every word and look of hers to the workers round 
her. I remember the wind which took the hay 
from the prong as it was shaken out, and stirred 
the elms all the morning, murmuring a language 
which it seemed one ought to understand ; the 
lilac-grey of the eastern sky beyond the elms ; the 
harsh honey of the elder hanging along the hedge, 
at once luscious and austere, the smell which every 
summer mingles with the hay to make the 
strongest of all the spells which conjure through 
the outward senses. That gust must have gone 
by when I found myself at last close to the vision 
of the wild-rose face, the arms raised to put back 
the blown hair from the forehead, the smile which 
lit deep in her eyes before it began to crease the 
cheek and lift the corners of the mouth. 

Of these recoveries of the past, the most vivid 
have for their scene my first playgrounds of 
Sandwell stream and Allington hills. Some 
fifteen years from my first recollection of those 
coasts had worked a heavy change upon the 
face of the country ; the lavender-fields still 
gave way to ghastly quarters of mean building ; 
one by one the familiar woods or meadows 
showed the fatal notice-board ; a new nation 
swarmed in upon the barely finished streets 
and staked-out estates. I had always a way of 
making up eclectic backgrounds for my imagina- 
tions, and for a time those Surrey hills and 

139 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

streams, with their relics of fast-vanishing pastoral 
beauty, served me well enough as scenery for my 
experiments in letters and arts. For two or three 
years I lived in a make-believe world of my own, 
materialised in copy-book epics and countless 
drawings done out of one's own head, with a 
terrible waste of fancy ; a world that was mediaeval 
and Gothic, as many another lad's must have been 
then, shaped under a medley of influences, — Pre^ 
Raphaelite pictures and the later cycle of Arthurian 
legend. Such things as the designs for the 
Tennyson " Poems," by Rossetti and Millais, or a 
Joan of Arc by Du Maurier, in the " Cornhill," 
stirred an enthusiasm which even yet prevents the 
full judgment due to all modern antiques. After 
a time my imaginative works in laborious pen-and- 
ink were considered worthy of the discipline of 
drawing from the cast and the draped model. 
Studies in a life class in a dim and dusty little 
cockpit off Newman Street, and more academic 
lessons in the echoing emptiness of a national 
workshop, served to show that the stuff I had 
would not stand the shaping ; and spite of the 
complementary testimonials of two of my guides, 
who told me severally that " I could draw, but had 
no surface," and that " I had ideas, but couldn't 
draw," I abandoned the labours of the Conte 
crayon and the bread pellet, and went back to 
Dr. Ransome. The time was not all lost ; at the 
Museum I learned at least the inexorable standard 

140 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

of the Theseus and the metopes ; an ivory, or 
fourteenth-century window-glass at Kensington 
was matter for a week's imaginings. On my 
homeward journey day by day I could idealise 
the Green Park into lawns of Camelot, almost as 
easily as in early morning walks I made the groves 
of Nonsuch or the high-hedged fields by Morden 
the scenery of visions — crowded epic and vivid 
fresco colour — of the happy prime. Those were 
the days of my service to Lystrenore, Princess of 
the land of Arvall, after the last long thoughts 
of Barbara des Vceux had died, and before those 
hay-time visions of Letty Ransome had found 
their power. They were not altogether unwhole- 
some ; for, after all, spite of drawings done out of 
one's head, and wastes of blank verse, one was 
learning certain aspects of the world at a much 
greater rate than one was putting off one's fancies 
upon it. Yet the suburban-Arthurian world 
presently needed a fresher air, which first blew in 
a very timely manner from Cumberland dales. 
The change from our cooped country to the 
horizons of waste moor or jagged peaks, the fell 
purple-dark under the streaming cloud, the yew- 
hung steeps beneath the crag wall shimmering 
grey and vaporous in the heat, was one summer's 
piece of education ; and if I at once forsook the 
Idylls for the Excursion, the conversion was 
healthy at least in this, that it led to no 
derivative essays ; there was an end to any sort 

141 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

of imitative production, pictorial or epic, once 
for all. 

By a subtle and particular revenge of time, my 
daylight visions of the past have more and more 
to do with Oxford as the years go by. This 
morning the Warden shows me a letter from 
Molly Crofts, full of the doings of Commem, and 
" the most brilliant Encsenia ever known ; " and 
presently I am away in the dead ends of Summer 
Term thirty years ago, and find myself high up 
in the gallery of the Sheldonian, close to one of 
the upper windows, looking out on the steep 
perspective of the street, over whose cobblestones 
winds from Balliol an absurd little foreshortened 
procession in scarlet and black. Over against 
me one of the statues of the Clarendon Building 
blocks the view, its joints and iron cramps and 
hollow shadows keenly clear on the white stone 
which glares dazzlingly against the opaque violet- 
blue of the sky. Across the street is a front of 
mouldered gables and mullions, and the confused 
chimneys and roofs of the town ; and then, asleep 
in the cloudless noon, the swell of blue hills, hills 
without a name, with no landmark of Botley 
poplars or Cumnor clump, a mere glimpse of 
happy places in country silence and ease, a 
prophecy of the untravelled world awaiting the 
feet delivered from bondage. For at that time 
the reverend walls were a prison-house ; I observed 
bounds and ordinances with impatient exactitude, 

142 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

and kept the rulers at immitigable distance. I 
had fallen into an interregnum between two minds, 
a restless humour of discontent which fretted at 
an imagination of time running to waste in sterile 
humanities, and made me envy those brown-faced 
mowers swinging through the meadows along 
the tow-path. The attitude was perhaps partly 
due to chances of upbringing, but not alto- 
gether. There was something fundamental in 
my careful solitude. I turned out not long since 
an old Conington's ^neid of those days, with a 
motto I had written on the fly-leaf — Solus incedo — 
and through all the mewling coxcombry of it, I 
have to acknowledge a touch of fate. There are 
cases in which one recognises with mixed feelings 
that one was right at twenty, after all. 

So on that summer morning I turned from the 
procession that drew towards the Twelve Caesars, 
with a defiance light-hearted at the thought of 
the last year of servitude already running out, 
and lifted my eyes to the sleeping hills and all 
that lay beyond. 

And even at the moment I think the spirit of 
the place began its counter-stroke, put forth a 
hint of the power it held, a hardly felt touch of 
the pang that was to come when all the blue hills 
were travelled and despoiled, and we return to 
look among the old walls for the grace which we 
held so lightly, and yet was perhaps the best thing 
we were to know. 

143 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

In all these reconstitutions of mine — of shining 
hayfields, of narrow streets in the sun, black- 
shadowed under archways and crumbling porticoes, 
of a slow-spinning eddy in the green water of a 
summer flood, that comes round the edge of a 
reed-bed, and parts the flags to show the dreaming 
spires — what defence is to be made against the 
censure of those who shake solemn heads at such 
necromancy, charge me with playing with shadows 
while the solid hour demands my energies ? 
Nothing to their purpose, I am afraid ; perhaps I 
should do best to refuse to plead, or to counter- 
charge — as may be done with no great pains and 
a good deal of effect — with a reflection on the 
qualities of those belauded activities. When once 
the Warden took me up upon the matter of my 
too pictorial or scenic idiosyncrasy of thinking, 
I read him one or two places in Berkeley's 
Alciphron, where the objects of sight are offered 
as arbitrary signs, " by whose sensible intervention 
the Author of Nature constantly explaineth him- 
self to the eyes of men : " and suggested that he 
and a good many others might on their part 
be giving a quite insufficient attention to the 
language those signs should express, and might 
be missing intimations which mere loiterers like 
myself, following their bent of note-taking, or even 
mere vacant reception, happened to light upon. 
I would not exchange for fifty of the Warden's 
Compensation Theories the instinct which at 

144 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

seeming random marked hours and places on the 
way, and brings back the old Junes to outshine 
the blue depths seen here beyond the beech-tree 
shade, so persistently and exactly that at times I 
am led to guess at some relation and meaning 
beneath the careless-seeming choice. 



145 



XIV 

July 3. 
My own hay grass being reduced to a minute 
acreage — almost a matter for the swap-hook and 
wheelbarrow — I am obliged to take my seasonable 
pleasure in observing other men's fields. My 
neighbour at the Folly Farm handles his forty 
acres in the wholesale modern way ; but that still 
leaves us the smell of the fresh-cut swathe and the 
rising stack, and — with a little shutting of the 
eyes — some of the early associations of haytime. 
The mowing-machine, having finished in due course 
the cutting of the smaller fields, the Alder-Legs, 
Ox Pasture, and Tanner's Mead, jolts and lurches 
into the Twelve Acre, the last and largest piece of 
grass on the farm, meaning to lay in swathe by 
nightfall, if no mishap betide, as much as once on 
a time would have cost two good scythemen the 
better part of a week. If anything is to hinder, it 
will be some fault in the machine's anatomy, a 
split pin jarred out, or a screw stripped ; there is 
nothing in the weather, or in the " manners " of 
the grass (as we say) to offer any delay. The 
meadow shows the green-bronze of just-ripe 

146 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

herbage, the fine broken colour made by the red- 
browns and greys of the seed-heads powdered over 
the lush green bottom. The long slope is bright 
with buttercup, Ragged-Robin, and rusty sorrel — 
gayer to the eye than to the moralising mind — 
and rolls in ceaseless waves like a sea under the 
south-west breeze, breaking into foam along the 
shore where the swaying ox-eyes and hemlock line 
the hedge. The clouds are "high" enough and 
"hard" enough to satisfy the country prognostic 
of set-fair weather ; the sun rarely breaks through 
their serried lines or the vault of fine-spun vapour 
under which they sail, but fills the whole sky with 
a diffused fire, too broad and bright for the eyes 
without the shading hand, and pours an almost 
shadowless daylight on the fields. 

When I went into the meadow on my round of 
the fields this morning, the mowing-machine, gay 
from the works in blue and scarlet paint, the gold- 
leaf still fresh on the lettering of its patents and 
prize medals, was receiving the last touches with 
the oiler and cotton-waste due to the new toy. 
The driver gets up on the seat, the horses answer 
the jerk of the reins and the " Git hahk ! " with a 
sedate half-turn, and the rattling engine plunges 
into the grass. But before it can cut its first lane 
down the slope, the way has been prepared for it 
by an older tool. Just as the machine got under 
weigh, old Abram Branch, who has cleared a 
width for the horses all round the hedge-sides with 

147 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

the scythe, came up to the corner where I was 
standing, and stood to watch his successor at 
work. Small and bent and brown, hardly a day 
older in all the years the parish has known him, 
every haytime he appears from somewhere " along 
up'ards " — he rarely owns a more precise domicile 
than that — with his kettle and a few belongings in 
a sack over one shoulder, and his treasured scythe, 
its edge carefully guarded by its grooved and 
warped hazel-rod, over the other, and resumes his 
ancient trade. The glory of the scythe departed, 
the skilled mower ceased hereabouts some twenty 
years ago ; the great days of Herculean work and 
commensurate beer are over. But there is still a 
remnant left ; the old craft still holds, and will 
perhaps continue to hold the lower place to which 
it so quickly fell. There is always the strip to be 
cleared for the machine's first sally ; there are 
rough and uneven pieces where the rigid cutter 
cannot go, to call for the more adaptable tool. 
Old Branch, after he has mowed the avenue round 
the twelve-acre, has the next field all to himself, a 
narrow strip between two shaws, whose humpy 
brows and wet hollows would capsize the machine 
if it ventured upon them. " They got to come to 
me, ye see," says Abram, as he knocks out his 
pipe, and sets about sharpening his blade for the 
thistles and rushes, looking a little wistfully, 
perhaps, at the even depth of the grass with its 
thick moist bottom, which is not for him. He 

148 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

watches the machine as it comes whirring down 
the field, and as he moves off towards his own 
province repeats with a jerk of the head towards 
the supplanter : " Pieces where he can't go, they 
wants the scythe to 'em ; and then, ye see, they 
got to come to me^ 

I preferred to follow the craftsman to his waste 
corner and watch the historic rather than the 
present mode. There will be time and to spare 
this next thirty years to observe the development 
of mechanism ever reducing the human element in 
labour to lower terms ; the motor-mower and the 
electric elevator will presently demand attention in 
ways not to be ignored ; but the chance of watching 
the survival of a vanishing art, the height of an 
accumulated tradition of skill, that may die with- 
out an heir to-morrow, is by all arguments of good 
economy a thing to be taken when it comes. I 
perched myself on the heave-gate between the 
two fields ; and there, under the crest of the slope 
and away to the windward, the restless burr of the 
link and pinion scarcely reached me ; what I heard 
was the "sound to rout the brood of cares," the 
crisp rustle and swish of the steel, an even pulse of 
sound, after Nature's own pattern both in rhythm 
and tone, in tune with the voices of winds and 
waters ; and yet, with its pause and ictus, a thing 
of art in its own way as complete and elaborate as 
a hexameter. For the eye's pleasure there is the 
balanced turn and sway of the body, the shifting of 

149 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

the light on the muscles of the sunburnt arms, the 
easy grace of the man's knack, almost without 
effort, it seems to the onlooker here at the barvvay 
under the dog-rose hedge. But the grass is rank 
and wiry, and every time that the swathe is 
finished at the hedgeside, and sometimes before it 
is half done, the scythe must be sharpened. There 
IS a trick in the handling of the rubber which is 
not to be picked up in a day ; and the choice of 
the stone, the matching of its grain and hardness 
with the temper of the steel is a gift of experience. 
Old Abram touches up his blade delicately, as if 
he loved it. Its edge is worn down in a wavy line 
to within an inch or so of the rib at the back ; it 
is a very old blade, he says ; you can't get new 
metal like that now. The handle of the scythe, 
worm-eaten as all old hazel is apt to be, and 
visibly *' tender" at the head, is also a survival 
from more painstaking days, its curves and angles 
full and ample ; the new shafts which hang out- 
side the country ironmongers' doors when haytime 
comes round approach more and more to the 
slovenly simplicity of the straight line. Knowledge 
such as this, and some understanding of the varied 
" hang " of the blade and its angle with the shaft, 
according to the user's idiosyncrasy and the kind 
of work it is meant to do, the several qualities of 
rivetted and cast backs, the way to measure off the 
places for the two " doles " or grips on the sneath, 
any one might learn from Abram as he rests a 

150 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

minute between sharping-up and starting again on 
the new swathe. But to know the beauty of the 
tool one must learn to handle it, to master the way 
in which the stroke runs, circling in the curve of 
the blade, but dragged a little inwards at the 
finish ; one must acquire the instinctive knack of 
hitting off the distance between the edge and the 
ground, according to the quality and state of the 
grass, and the way to make the point and the heel 
both do their proper work in the stroke. There is 
a degree in even an amateur's skill when the 
standing grass, rustling above its dew-drenched 
bottom, calls to the mower much as the south-west 
ripple across the stream calls to the fly-fisher, and 
when the habit and mastery of the scythe are a 
pleasure certainly comparable to that in the 
control of the rod. There are not wanting mis- 
haps to help out the parallel ; the hidden mole-hill 
to bury the point of the blade in, the bit of stone 
in the grass which tinkles along the steel and 
takes off all the edge at a stroke are comparable to 
the alder-twig, the knot on the flowering rush 
which wait for the angler's backward cast. It is 
the simplicity of the scythe, the product, perfected 
and fixed, of the early wisdom of the world, and its 
adaptableness to varying conditions, that make it 
an artist's instrument. " He," says old Branch, 
nodding towards the engine droning beyond the 
hedge, " he's terrified by they emmet-heaps ; and 
if he comes to a stump or a dick, he's done. Why, 

151 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

us mowers, we can cut right round a partridge- 
nest, and never set her off." This, maybe, is a 
flourish, fellow to the classic ploughman's boast 
that he could draw his furrow straight enough to 
put out a worm's eye ; but it contains a truth. 

The next time that Abram mowed up to the 
hedge, I put my coat on the gate, and took the 
scythe from him for a turn across the field. I 
found that the old knack, untried for a good many 
years, still served me tolerably, and with Abram 
watching me from the hedge, a little solicitous, 
perhaps, for his favourite in alien hands, I made 
fair practice, only once slicing the sod and leaving 
two or three ragged-bitten tufts behind me. But 
before I was halfway across the field, the unused 
muscles were calling for caution, and after a few 
more strokes, in a posture sufficiently upright to 
have satisfied even Cobbett's requirements, when 
he saw the old man mowing short grass at East 
Everley, I handed the tool back to its owner, and 
watched him go swinging, taking a swathe a foot 
wider than mine, tirelessly across the field. I went 
back to the gate again and put on my coat, think- 
ing of several ways in which a training like Abram's, 
with its resultant amazingly tough fibre at seventy 
odd, might be serviceable to the country, a training 
for which half-hours of slouching drill in the school 
yard, or even fortnight volunteer camps are not a 
complete substitute. And once more I conjectured 
how long a scientific age will continue to think it 

152 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

can obtain its ideals without paying Fate a penny 
for the accommodation. 

The next time that Abram stopped to sharp-up, 
he accompanied the clink of his whetstone with 
more criticism of the machine, which had been 
silent for some time, save for sounds of hammering 
and a forcible discussion between the driver and 
the man who had been sharpening the spare cutter 
by the upper gate. "I call this work" says 
Abram ; " makes a man o' ye, I reckon. But 
sittin' all day like that chap over there, all of a 
heap, on a seat that pretty nigh shakes the innards 
out o' ye, and just sayin* * Come up ! ' and * Git 
back' " 

The aposiopesis is eloquent ; he slips back the 
rubber into its sling, and bends to his swathe 
again. What ought I to say to him, oh hierarchs 
of progress, the next time that he works his way 
to the hedge, wipes the sweat out of his eyes, and 
stands a minute to take the stiffness out of his 
back ? Shall I reprove his barbarous economics, 
vindicate to him the gifts of science and the march 
of mind, tell him that the old threat of rm^vog 
dfjLrjfTEiQ is blessedly fulfilled in that jolted figure 
perched on the racketing machine ? Or shall I 
leave him in solitary enjoyment of his theory that 
every tool has two ends, one working on the 
matter, the other on the man ? I think I will be 
indulgent to the myth which his faith implies, that 
somewhere in the tract between the helpless first 

153 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

childhood of the world and its old age, a race of 
grown men, capable of all heights and depths of 
human grace and strength, understanding by 
heaven-sent vision precisely how far labour may 
be saved without losing the labourer, forged the 
crooked scythe the old man wields so well. 



154 



XV 



July 5. 
Full summer, with keen sunlight and furnace-air 
and grey-blue sky, has come all at once, without 
prelude, as it seems to do in all these later years ; 
and I am back again in the long mornings in my 
old place under the cool dark of the beech tree, 
reading the old books over, smelling the grass and 
mould as they reek to the sun, and looking off now 
and again to watch the swifts whirl across the sky, 
the sheep in the meadow shift and pack themselves 
into the shadow as it narrows along the elm-hung 
hedge, or the clouds draw overhead, burning and 
wasting as they go, through the dazzling loop- 
holes of the leaves. Yesterday there were signs 
of thunder working up out of the south-east, the 
watching of whose growth became more of the 
morning's work than my book. From the first 
beginnings which I can remember, my temper has 
always answered with an instinctive restlessness 
to the tense atmosphere of brewing storm ; but 
though the old anxiety does not seem to lose much 
of its effect under lapse of time, I am able to find 
a sort of repose in the vast unity of purpose, the 

155 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

tremendous strategy of the gathered power. I 
had been reading Lucretius, and when the first low 
roll of thunder settled any doubt there might be 
as to the meaning of the grey sheeted vapour 
barred with lean black streaks, I turned to those 
theories of storms in the sixth book. To us who 
know such a vast deal better, all those contrivances 
of clouds butting against each other or shouldering 
sidelong, and of the explosive winds pent within 
them, seem sad stuff indeed ; and one takes refuge 
in the poetry of the descriptions. To my fancy, 
all Lucretius' science seems curiously offhand and 
accidental ; it looks as if he had sat down, gnawed 
his stylus, and evolved there and then the laboured 
explanations which he had never thought of before, 
or, where he copies Epicurus, had chosen haphazard 
among his master's light-hearted alternatives. 
The Warden, I believe, once contemplated a selec- 
tion, which would leave out the whole of Memmius' 
Mangnall, as he called it, and take only the in- 
spired places. In the descriptive passages there 
are, besides the general beauty of form and colour, 
here and there fine particularities of detail, which 
in Latin verse always, I think, strike us as a little 
surprising. Their unexpectedness may be partly 
due to schoolboy reminiscences of the ground-out 
quantum of nonsense lines (was there ever a 
greater literary crime than giving Virgil to the 
average fourth-form boy } ) ; but in the main it is 
by force of contrast with the customary looseness 

156 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

and convention of the methods of description that 
the rare instances of close direct portraiture tell as 
they do. After "unda horrescit," "nox polum 
occupat," and the like, Virgil's " ignea rima micans 
percurrit " — which is very near Turner's lightning, 
and not the least like the toasting-forks and zig- 
zags of popular art — comes with a peculiar vivid- 
ness of reality. Here in Lucretius that — 



and — 



and — 



" taetra nimborum nocte coorta 
Impendent atrae formidinis or a suj>erne" 

" Aut ubi per magnos montis cumulata videbis 
Insuper esse aliis alia atque urguere superne 
hi statione locata sepultis undique ventis" 



" Devolet in terram liquidi color aureus ignis," 

are pieces of actual observation, as direct a seizure 
of Nature as Wordsworth's, as workmanlike, even, 
as Crabbe's. We did not exhaust all the matter, 
after all, in the texts we learned at school. 

After muttering for an hour along the southern 
horizon, the thunder drew by on an easterly slant 
of wind, and the rest of the day was all clear sun 
and cool airs blowing from regions fresh-washed 
by the distant storm. In the afternoon the 
Warden came in, and we sat on the lawn and 
talked philosophy and Latin verse, as we do now 
and then, beginning this time from my morning's 
place in Lucretius. Men who have " kept up their 
classics '* are not so common hereabouts that we 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

often fail, when we get together under the beechen 
shade or in the Warden's Green Parlour, secure 
from the outer world, to drift upon the old subjects. 
This is only when we are quite by ourselves ; 
inasmuch as our friends of the neighbourhood, for 
good reasons of their own, refuse to believe that 
any one can be serious or quite honest in caring 
for the things he was taught at school. There is 
no harm in the arrangement ; before the outer 
circle we discuss Betty Yarborough-Greenhalgh's 
engagement, or our friend Sims-Bigg's new motor- 
car with, I venture to think, quite a tolerable grace ; 
and we retire at the proper conjunctions to our 
private whims, to noster amor Libethrides, with 
perhaps an added pleasure in the return. It is a 
pleasure which runs, I fear, little chance of being 
profaned by crowds in any time within our scope. 
I came across a place in Ste. Beuve lately, where 
he speaks of the impossibility of getting his 
audience to listen to the classics, in the severer 
sense : he will try what he can do with the older 
Pliny. If that was so, there and then, where shall 
we say that we stand to-day 1 

The Warden grumbles at the small proportion 
of high poetry in Lucretius — "all smothered in 
absolutely drivelling physiology : not one line in 
fifty that could stand by itself" — and so on, in his 
usual forceful way. He maintains that there is 
room and to spare for his manner of presenting 
things in gross ; we have overdone the impartial 

158 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

and judicial attitude ; with our feeble means of 
expression, a thoroughly one-sided statement is 
often the only way to give the force of certain 
qualities. He thinks it is a pity that our present 
scientific hierarchs don't embody their discoveries 
in verse. They haven't even the chance of eternal 
poetry to buoy up their exploded theories two 
thousand years hence. They, who are so ready 
with the teaching of billions of years, won't look 
at the lessons of a few centuries, results almost 
under their very noses ; they seem to think that 
somehow in the last fifty years or so we have got 
beyond the relative state of knowledge, and that 
since they learned to spell everything is positive. 
Lucretius was just as cocksure ; but we have 
something to forgive him for. 

I have a long-kept theory of my own, that one 
sure test of a writer's claim to be heard is his 
possessing a perfectly individual and unmistakable 
character and style. This works out, if any one 
will take the trouble to try it conscientiously, with 
curious consistency and far-reaching results. If 
you will only have dealings with works whose 
authors could not possibly have been some one 
else, the amount of impersonal systems and histories 
and criticism "expressed," as the reviewers say, 
**in direct and lucid English," well ordered and 
entirely common, with the man's soul and humour 
only coming through by means of negatives and 
uncomely lapses ; the amount, I say, of this 

159 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

" every-gentleman's-library " literature from which 
you will be delivered is a very considerable thing. 
In the classics, I take Lucretius to be a notable 
instance of the theory ; because the personal ex- 
pression seems to come and go pretty nearly in 
alternation, accordingly as he draws deep-chested 
breath in an exordium or illustration, or bites his 
nails over the business of shoving hooked atoms 
into unlikely places, or pretending it is all fair to 
give his cosmos, ruining along the illimitable inane, 
a little jog to make its parallel lines of motion 
meet in a procreant clash. I produce this theory 
of mine, not for the first time, perhaps ; the 
Warden proceeds, as he has done before, to fit it 
into a corner of a roomier scheme of his own. He 
thinks that we can judge which philosophies and 
systems are in main intent and meaning true, and 
which are false from the bottom, by the test of 
their indirectness of expression. All the great 
true books are in oblique oration, by dialogue, 
fable and myth, essays, letters, drama. Whenever 
a man sits down to give us his cosmogony direct 
and complete, ground-plan and section, with data 
and appendices, his impersonal system and principia 
— well, he produces just " a standard work of refer- 
ence." Plato and Aristotle are, of course, the two 
types which will always divide the world ; and one 
may sort out their followers at one's leisure. 
You will find, says the Warden, that they hang 
together, and show their relationship quite curiously, 

i6o 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

as a general thing; look, for instance, at Mon- 
taigne's literary likings. Sometimes you may have 
to read a man for just everything he didn't mean : 
Lucretius, for instance, again. One may leave 
alone all those miserable guesses about the size 
of the sun, and simple oversights about penetra- 
bility of matter, and so on ; and read *' -^neadum 
genetrix " for the fiftieth time, and never be tired 
of it. 

I tried back to my own theory of the patent- 
mark of personal expression ; that it all depends 
upon whether one looks at the world and life as a 
thing per se, sufficiently absorbing in its own laws 
and politics, or only as a symbol of something else, 
one vast complex mythus, as Coleridge says. Of 
course, if a man thinks he sees reflections of a 
finer light, or hears a strange tongue, he'll want 
to get something of the mythical into his work ; 
to indicate, like a good sketcher, instead of trying 
to realise like a mere copyist. Besides, there are 
his own eyes to be thought of ; he has to look for 
reflections, like Perseus with the Gorgon, not the 
direct light. 

The Warden acquiesced, with less qualification 
than I am accustomed to, and our conference did 
not go very much farther on that point. We know 
each other well enough to divine instinctively a 
seasonable silence ; and for half an hour, may be, 
the Warden made pencil notes which, I imagine, 
bore upon the great Theory, and I turned back to 

i6r M 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

my Lucretius again. I soon fell into that desultory- 
state of apprehension in which one finds that a 
sentence needs looking at twice, and gaps of irre- 
levance lengthen down the page : I don't mean the 
bodily dropping-ofif, rational enough on a summer 
afternoon when the brain has been wholesomely 
exercised after lunch, but a lighter and more 
spiritual occultation, due in this case, I think, to 
the surpassing goodness of the day, the pure 
luxury of the air and light and garden-smells, and 
shapes of trees and hills, and colours of the sky, 
which fairly out-faced the crooked signs on the 
paper and all their appeal. I gave it up at last, 
observing that the Warden's pencil had lapsed, 
and his notebook lay upon the grass ; and so I 
sat for a long while existing in the deep green 
shadow, imbibing the far-off light on the woods, 
and the rich vapours from grass and leaves and 
earth, vastly idle, and flattering myself that for 
once I was taking in, to my capacity, some little 
part of the immensity of good things which 
we are mostly too busy to receive, and storing 
something to remain, I hope, for less liberal 
days. 

Yesterday was beyond question a day of the 
year — such a day as comes but once or twice in a 
summer, and is not immeasurably removed from 
those days of a lifetime which all men ought to 
have down in their archives. Its beauty lay in 
fine shades of difference, that will not go into 

162 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

words. If one speaks of a perfect tempering of 
heat, light, wind : of vivid sky whose tender blue 
is by itself a still-fresh pleasure ; of fields of 
pearly vapour low down towards the horizon above 
the violet bloom of the hills ; of trees, shapes of 
massive sheen and hollow blackness ; of perfume 
that suggests a hundred sweets of the fields or the 
garden and goes before the nostril can for sure 
discern bean-flower or mignonette or clover — why, 
that means nothing in the world to a man who 
has not the key to it all, and the man who has 
it will not thank you for telling him. It is all fine 
and restrained and evanescent ; and you shall find 
plenty of people proof against its spell. I fear 
that most of the company that went from the 
village yesterday on their annual excursion did 
not think much of it. Mr. Myram — so his wife 
told me when I was down in the village this 
morning — took his top coat and umbrella with 
him when he started at 5 a.m. for the Crystal 
Palace ; it looked unsettled-like, he reckoned ; but 
he was inside the Palace all the day, listening to 
the great Brass Band Contest. That zvas lovely, 
he said ; sixty-nine bands a-playing the same 
selection one after the other between eleven o'clock 
and six ; that's what he calls music^ and chance it, 
he says. Beats him, how the judges could keep it 
all in their heads, he says, but he 'spects they put 
down every mistake, directly they makes it, . . . 
To-day the weather is settled enough, the shining 

163 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

grass is mown, the brassy heat chokes the sky 
with haze ; the light is raw and glaring. Down in 
the village, where the smell of the brickworks 
tempers a suggestion of the effluent from the 
sewage-field, and a pettish wind whirls an eddy of 
dust and papers into one's eyes at the street 
corners, walks Myram expansive in an eighteen- 
penny Panama hat and a white waistcoat which 
already bears the print of sweating thumbs. 
" Ah ! " says Myram, and Myram's circle at the 
eleven o'clock beer, " something like summer at 
last, and hope it's going to last, too ! " The twist 
is altogether in Myram's vein of humour. I came, 
I confess, on the identical conceit in Sidney's 
" Arcadia " the other day ; but somehow in 
Myram's mouth it does not seem to be in the 
right line of descent. Or is the fault mine, some 
uncandid difference warping my judgment of the 
contemporary wit } 

It would perhaps be well if I only differed from 
our Alpheus in such matters of taste as wit and 
the weather. We are sundered by a whole sphere 
of subjects concerning which I clearly apprehend 
that he is safe to get his way. He stands for 
Progress, for Forward Policies, for the blessings of 
Science, for Education, in a manner which I think 
some better known professors of the faith might 
study with advantage to us all. I admire, in the 
primary sense of the word, a dozen distinctive 
qualities which make him in type the master of 

164 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

the world — a gift of dealing with figures which I 
cannot sufficiently respect, a mind undisturbed by 
the slightest sense of beauty or humour in life, by 
the least consciousness of baffling incommensurable 
things just outside our scale ; a serviceable integrity 
which seems to preserve him conscience-clean in 
the muddy walks of local government and expansive 
trade. If his foot be fated to slide, it will be in 
the dim gyres of municipal opportunity. There is 
in the management of our little drains and paths a 
riddle, a mystery of iniquity which confounds the 
merely external critic. In the business there 
seems to be a mesmeric force, sufficient not only 
to charm aspiring units such as Myram, but to 
make whole bodies of comparatively cultured 
people, individually most amiable and upright 
props of rural society, to become accomplices in 
obscure obstruction and delay, impenetrable silences, 
whiffs of ill breath suggesting buried crimes, the 
dragging, leaden inertia of adjournment and the 
slumbrous brain. I read in the county journal 
week by week the proceedings of the various 
bodies who keep house for us, and I measure the 
worth of all their energies, their loans and Govern- 
ment inquiries, their election fights and Rate- 
payers' Defence Societies, their recriminating 
committee meetings and letters to the papers, by 
the undisturbed persistence of an open drain from 
the cottages at Tillman's Green, whose stench has 
made the highway hold its nose summer by 

165 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

summer for eighteen years of my recollection, and 
seems to exist as a symbol of subtler taints in 
the air. 

I know very well that the future lies with friend 
Myram and his kind. Indeed, I do not know 
what defence I should make, if he took the trouble 
to compare the fruits of his work and mine — his 
thriving days, his control of labour and handling 
of the national life, his solid worth and standing, 
his place in the world hacked out for himself: 
against all this to set my imponderable self and 
works were in all ways impertinent. In the village 
polity which I sometimes forecast, such idlers as I 
and the Warden — after several well-meant chances 
given us and incorrigibly made light of — will be 
extinguished for the good of a serious common- 
weal ; and I doubt if either of us would under 
those conditions care to appeal against the sentence. 
We should have had our good and our evil things 
in our own way ; we happened to have learned the 
etymologic sense of the word " fastidious," we had 
not the brave digestions of the Myram breed, and 
we missed the charm of wearing dirty white waist- 
coats and spats, and living in a terra-cotta villa 
with cement lions at the steps, of relishing the 
whiff from the main drain, and those spicy breezes 
which blow in Board Rooms and Council Halls ; 
we let slide the chance of leaving a thumb-mark 
on the clay of the emerging race. Yet we had 
our private gains ; we picked up and pocketed 

i66 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

sundry gifts which the victorious faction trod under- 
foot ; we kept better company, I venture to think ; 
if we wasted our summer mornings on Lucretius 
and his theories of the atmosphere, at least we did 
it for fun ; and if under the crowning dispensation 
which I foresee the Warden and I should be led 
out to suffer together, I think we should have our 
revenge upon the executive body — as we have had 
upon other incarnations of the kind — in an im- 
pulsive grin at the humour of it all, when we were 
once outside the door. 

And yet — and yet — one sometimes dreams one 
might get one's own way, and hew the Philistines, 
gently enough, without any world-shaking con- 
vulsion, after alL There is no divine hedge about 
the plan of government by a house divided against 
itself; nothing but an odd and as yet barely 
historical infatuation ; there is no saying what 
solidity of national happiness we might not attain 
if public men were by some humour of fortune to 
compound their too lofty principles, and aim at 
relative, commonplace, feasible good in their 
experiments on the body of the state, instead of 
agonising for positive perfection, the transcendental 
glories of their platforms and their cries. Taste 
only exists to change ; and one thinks that the 
run of luck must presently alter, and the possible 
combinations of change for the worse may be 
exhausted even in our own time. I may yet 
live to hear the Warden taking Alpheus and 

167 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

his mates in Lucretius, and Dempster reading 
to his classes in Montaigne, and even find myself 
a personage in the new-based republic, having 
my say in the nicer, airier, gayer world, without 
even stirring from my post beneath the beech^ 
tree shade. 



168 



XVI 

July 17. 
There are summer days — yesterday was one of 
them — when the world seems to kindle at the sun, 
when clouds, grass, waving tree-tops, green fields 
of wheat burn in the overflowing fire. A steady 
wind fans the flame ; one feels the truth of the 
Lucretian touch of the sun " feeding on the blue." 
The roses haste to blow wide and fall, the straw- 
berries colour hourly, and send their spice across 
the garden ; the year is at the height, there 
will be no richer day this twelvemonth. The 
streaming plume of cloud that rises with imper- 
ceptible motion from the south to the zenith is as 
bright as vapours of earth can be : the leaves are 
white fire where the light glances on them above, 
and emerald where it strikes through ; the swallow 
that sweeps across the lawn gleams blue on head 
and shoulder ; everything glows, wastes, and con- 
sumes ; and the expense of life is set before our 
meditations as at no other time. I have tried to 
make this impression of use and spending answer- 
able for the regretful pang which sometimes comes 
in times of happiest weather ; but that paradox is 

169 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

one which goes beyond our best guesses. The 
attempt to analyse even so far as to suggest a 
hypothesis was unwise ; it is a sufficiently vulgar 
error to make our half-decipherable alphabet of 
sensual forms the key of any enigma we may 
conjecture to be hidden under its signs. 

Yesterday was Sunday, and some such medi- 
tations as these filled up a half-hour under the 
beech before it was time to set off down the hill 
to morning church, and another twenty minutes 
in the churchyard, while I read the old headstones 
and wondered once more what manner of men 
were my acquaintances Timothee Lintot and 
Cleophas Comber a hundred and seventy years 
ago, listened to the changes of the bells, and 
watched the swifts whirl across the dark of the 
yews or balance high up in the blue. Whenever 
the sense of the magnificence of human achieve- 
ment is strong upon me, I like to go and look at 
the motions of those soot-brown wings in their 
miracle of controlled force. Every mode of their 
movement, the quick oaring flight, rolling a little 
from side to side, as a fine sculler may roll a little 
in the exuberance of his mastery ; the climbing 
flutter, light as down on an eddy of air ; the head- 
long stoop ; the rush of the race from whose vehe- 
ment swish one jerks back one's head instinctively, 
a twentieth of a second too late, in man's ponderous 
way, if the chances of collision had rested on the 
human judgment. I take an extreme pleasure in 

170 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

watching any bodily feat thoroughly well done ; 
the knack of even a second-rate batsman, the 
poise and shoulder-swing of a finished skater, the 
pause and lift of the mower, are all good things 
to see ; and yet the hulking clumsiness of the best 
of human attitude compared with the motions of 
the beasts ! The prettiest high-jumper that ever 
grazed the bar never came near the grace with 
which Nym clears a bramble spray in his hedge- 
bottom scrambles, tossing himself up and out from 
a standing take-off — every movement, from the 
flip of the ears to the crook of the tail, one piece 
of perfect rhythm. And, to come back to the 
swifts, I think no candid person could look at their 
career for five minutes without a touch of shame 
for all our monstrous contrivances of speed, our 
roaring, fuming, stinking machines, always ugly 
and noisome in ratio to their power, by the side of 
that silent economy of navigation, the enormous 
proportionate power of the frail wings, the control 
of steerage and arrest, the management of balance 
and planes whose first principles our toy-science 
still boggles at. 

When the one-bell was near its last stroke, I left 
the swifts to their skiey exercises, and turned into 
the porch with the last stragglers of the congrega- 
tion. Our church and its services afford, I think, 
less excuse than a good many others for the losing 
of the devotional in the critical faculty. There 
are remnants of ancient beauty in the building 

171 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

which have survived the fury of two generations 
of restorers ; but I sometimes imagine that we 
might put in a plea in defence of modern short- 
comings in public devotion, if we were to allege 
all that we have lost in the way of encouragement, 
compared with the possessions of our forefathers, 
whose tabernacles were quick with fresh beauty, a 
piece of life coming out of their own hearts and 
heads. With the Warden in desk or pulpit we 
are at least exercised in godliness, if not always 
lifted up ; the rude mouldings of capital and pillar, 
no rubbed-down template inanity of our own 
mode, tell us at least of grace, and, we like to 
think, of faith. We are not troubled here with 
passing fashions of church furniture which I have 
heard spoken of as " stately symbolism," and which 
appear to one of the profane as strangely tawdry 
selections from the catalogues of an entirely com- 
mercial ecclesiastical decorator. But we cannot 
escape from our east window, a tenth-rate specimen 
of the vogue of forty years ago, depraving our 
eyes week by week with its intolerable false 
scarlets and blues ; nor yet from others of more 
recent date, which wait the damnation of the next 
generation, windows in a sort of Flemish Renais- 
sance manner, with patches of unclean clarets and 
bottle-greens on large spaces of white ground ; 
trade antiques, both of the genres, with a definitely 
irreligious influence in the direction either of 
debauched sentiment or naughty temper. It is 

172 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

poor comfort to turn from these irritants, crude or 
cultured, to the faint stains on the wall above 
them, relics of pleated robe, of peacock-eyed wings, 
of an aureole and a face mild and placid as we 
could not conceive a face now ; shadows of paint- 
ing of the fourteenth century which have survived 
churchwardens' whitewash and the restorers from 
the Cromwellians to our own time. In like manner 
one sometimes escapes, in churches where they are 
very musical, from Dr. Sesquialtera's last new 
minor double-chant to sudden mercies of Battishill 
or Purcell, heart's melody after tormented noise, 
which takes hold of the drowsy urchins in the 
choir and the flighty young women in the aisle, 
and pulls them together all at once out of their 
semitone flatness, and perhaps into finer intonation 
of the understanding also. And through all such 
frettings and reliefs clearer and clearer comes the 
assurance that we have to do not with a matter of 
good and bad, but of right and wrong, divided by 
a hair's-breadth line whose position it much con- 
cerns us to ascertain. Into some such digression 
as this I have now and again been led, in yawning 
hours, let us say, of the Vicar's less fruitful ex- 
positions ; but yesterday, when in the pauses of 
the Kyrie I heard the swifts shrilling round the 
spire high up in the burning blue, my thoughts 
wandered to the — 

" Happy birds that sing and fly 
Round Thine altars ..." 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

of our morning hymn; and a man with a tem- 
perament as analytic as aquafortis may perhaps 
be forgiven for wondering why the saints are 
happier who sing out of tune in a close heat and 
aroma of Sunday-best, under the gules and azure 
of that murderous window. Perhaps it was in a 
momentary nod of oblivion that the rude arches, 
the dull warmth, the cry of the swifts turned to 
shadowy vaulting crossed by dim-streaming rays 
from a high rose-window, filled with the soaring 
note of an angelic treble. My wandering was re- 
buked by hearing old Tully's voice in the hymn, 
giving the florid tenor with unmistakable fervour 
of intent, and next by the sight of Molly Crofts 
in the Warden's pew, seen a moment between a 
pillar and the gay parterre of hats in that quarter, 
her face as she sang instinct with something that 
my reckoning had left out of account, a quality 
missed by the analytic temper and the discursive 
mind, perhaps a motion of the wisdom of which it 
is said that she passeth and goeth through all 
things by reason of her pureness. 

After service I went on to the Almshouse, and 
while I waited for the Warden in the lodge-entry, 
I observed the congregation streaming dinner-wards 
down the street. Overhead the swifts still glanced 
and wheeled with their perfection of effortless 
grace, and never an eye was raised to look at 
them in all the company that crept along the 
earth with clumsy labour, with feet that trotted 

174 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

or lurched or waddled or minced, but did not 
show — not one pair in a hundred — that they had 
ever approached the first rudiments of the art of 
walking. And from the feet to the faces was no 
better change. A bringing-up in Phidian ideals is 
a two-sided gift to a man ; the failure of ordinary 
human features from the worshipped example may 
lie on the temper like a fretted wrong, and may 
add a last sting to the sense of one's obligations 
to " Progress." I think, from observations in other 
parts of our islands, that the people of this county 
are a singularly plain race ; but at best the nation 
is far below the reasonable and practicable standard 
of looks. Here as the churchgoers filed past the 
archway of the lodge in the clear sunlight, I must 
needs turn my spleen upon the safe and solid re- 
sistance of general principles, as I saw the almost 
universal deformity, the blunted and flattened and 
twisted features, the signs of undeveloped nature, 
the trace of diseases new and old, the fret and 
burden of all shapes of unhappy soul. Downright 
forceful ugliness, a thing of character and humour, 
would be a relief from this reign of slackness, in- 
sipidity, vacuous asymmetry. Such a little amend- 
ment would often put all right ! I find myself at 
times indulging a plastic instinct, saying that by 
flattening such a nose a little, bringing forward 
such a brow, patting out this hollow, pinching up 
that mouth I could botch the clay of many a 
hapless physiognomy into a practicable grace. It 

175 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

IS partly due to the Greeks and partly perhaps to 
an original list of humour that all my travels are 
a quest of good faces ; roads and inns, market- 
squares of country towns, cottage gardens, the 
fleeting shoals of railway platforms or London 
streets, in all I seek the beauty of the old descent. 
The faces which I mark — one or two in a day's 
journey, perhaps — have a certain common character 
not easy to define ; youth and a large degree of 
physical health are part of the spell, and I think 
ingenuousness and wholesome mind, and perhaps 
also a sort of pathetic expression, which for want 
of any rational cause I am pleased to attribute to 
the unconscious bearing about of a lost cause, the 
burden of a proscribed race. For of all generations 
of men we have set ourselves positively to deny 
the power of beauty ; every device of our social 
economy necessitously destroys it ; our very arts 
— not the toy-making of galleries and schools, but 
the workaday technic which gives us our lamp- 
posts and railway stations and shop-fronts — are an 
imbecile's outrage on the Muses. For the perfect- 
ness of pleasure in natural scents and sounds, we 
have the reign of stench and din ; most of us will 
breathe the sulphur and soot of a railway terminus 
without disgust, as they will breathe the summer 
wind through a fir-wood without conscious pleasure, 
and will find their thoughts as much disturbed by 
the clanking and roaring as by the murmur of 
the boughs and the sound of bees in the heather. 

176 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

We have our minds so constantly at the telescopic 
or microscopic focus that we lose the power of 
fixing them on the outward show of things at 
common range. The schooling which our excellent 
Dempster and his mates give to the rising race is 
perhaps the most sustained and elaborate attempt 
ever made to annul the senses, to put printed paper 
between us and the light, to prevent us taking into 
our own plain faces the least reflex of the beauty 
about us. Suppose that the arts are really as dead 
as they seem to be, and that we are right, not so 
much in preferring our stained-glass windows to the 
whitewashed fresco, or the crawling-alive hymns 
to Merbecke or Purcell, as in lumping all together 
in superior indifference : suppose that thus far we 
are justifiable, being as a nation too poor to allow 
ourselves any elegancies that cannot be hawked in 
the streets of the world ; yet there are elementary 
dangers in an incapacity to note the differences of 
natural things, earth and sky and human faces 
about us. We never look at the clouds, save in 
some blundering attempt at forecast when we feel 
the rain on our faces ; summer and winter hardly 
touch us but by discomforts of temperature ; we 
rejoice in our thundering right line of motion with 
its appalling waste of energy, blind to the lesson 
of the birds' wings. If we but knew, we might 
condone our own ugliness, perhaps in time 
amend it, by observing the human beauty which 
pow and then escapes the common curse. We 

177 N 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

have definitely turned away from one of the first 
lessons of the human curriculum, perhaps the 
simplest and deepest of all ; and we are already 
punished, blind and deaf in the appointed kind 
and degree. 

I had left the lodge, as the Warden was long 
in coming, and turned into the garden ; and I was 
running on thus to myself in a familiar strain, 
when I saw Molly Crofts coming down the long 
walk that leads from the Green Parlour between the 
larkspurs and the phloxes. She had taken off the 
buckler-broad hat which had kept in countenance 
its fellows of the mode, and with them had made 
the south aisle look like a flower-plot, and the sun 
shone very agreeably on the smooth brow and the 
crinkles of brown hair. She came on me at a 
corner, from behind a tall clump of sweet peas, 
and I had one of her gayest smiles, shining 
delightfully in the eyes before the mouth could 
begin to curve. Her look had something of 
summer Sunday morning in it, and I think kept 
still a little of the lifting up I had seen while we 
sang our hymn in such various strains. We made 
two or three turns up and down the walk together, 
and by the time the Warden joined us, surplice on 
arm, I had been able to remind myself of some 
half-forgotten qualities in those antique standards 
of mine, and to see how invincibly the great 
argument shows by the light of certain eyes, 



178 



XVII 

August 8. 
The most inveterate anchorite in country soli- 
tudes ought to go up to London now and then ; 
say, once a year. Until a just policy of decentra- 
lisation shall have brought to his doors a share of 
the good things at present stacked together in one 
noisy and malodorous region, there are pictures 
and music and — worst of all — people, not to be 
seen or heard without an occasional pilgrimage. 
But even without these reasons, a journey to town 
is worth its cost for the mere pleasure of getting 
back again. To know the full charm of the 
country one must escape out of the baked streets 
of August or November's dun shroud, straight into 
the breath of green fields or the mild sunlight 
sleeping on the faded woods. The dull roar of 
the traffic, the ceaseless tide of strange faces, the 
pallid smoky light, the complex smells, the sense 
of being swamped and lost in the press of life 
conspire to produce an obsession lasting through 
the sway and rumble of the sleepy afternoon train 
by which one's flight is made. Only when one 
descends at the little wayside station, where the 

179 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

nasturtiums in the flint-edged beds greet one 
with a not unrecognised rusticity and the station- 
master's salute implies congratulations on the 
accomplishment of the adventure set out upon 
under his auspices two whole days ago, does one 
begin to resume one's individuality and the grate- 
ful ease of self-respect. The sight of familiar faces 
and the exchange of greetings in the accustomed 
formula over cottage gates and at due corners of 
the road go some way to break the dreary spell ; 
but it is only when one turns, as the light begins 
to fail a little, out of the highway into the field- 
path, that the mind gets wholly clear of it. The 
scent of grass in the first cool of the dew and the 
sweet silence of the valley come in upon the heart 
with sudden tenfold charm — with the charm of 
privacy and quiet after the insolent interferences 
of town, of delicacy and fineness to a degree even 
till now unsuspected, the dearer for the recollec- 
tion of coarse confusion which it breathes away. 
One's personality expands and reposes itself, no 
more whirled like a half-drowned fly in some 
gutter-eddy, but as one perched aloft among green 
leaves that preens its feelers and opens its wings 
to the pleasant air. A last countercharm remains 
to complete the deliverance. Once the garden 
gate closes behind the traveller and the orbis 
terrarum possesses its proper centre again, every- 
thing seems to have a new perfection, a claim and 
lien not credibly ever to be run away from any 

1 80 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

more. The red pillars of the firs and their vaulted 
darkness never looked so solemn, the spaces of 
sky between them never so ethereally clear; the 
hush of evening was never so divine as it is to the 
wanderer who has won his way back to the upper 
airs from that grim underworld of town. 

From my last expedition to London I travelled 
down with Mrs. Sims-Bigg, who is an old adversary 
of mine in the matter of town versits country ; and 
our talk during the journey served to clear and 
define sundry musings which had infested my head 
during the day, and to start some new ones which 
for a while after continued to circle about the 
ground of the old controversy. If I failed to 
convert my enemy, as I seem to have failed on 
other occasions, I had at least the satisfaction 
of feeling the curious justness of my positions 
all the more soundly settled for the concussion 
of the fray. 

The traditional cause between the country and 
the town — the *' rure ego viventem, tu dicis in urbe 
beatum" — seems at length in the way of settle- 
ment, judgment going against the country almost 
by default. The contest, long waged with strangely 
equal fortune, has come to an end almost abruptly ; 
within living memory the town, the urban taste 
and habit, has overrun and occupied the rural 
territory : quicker even than the waste of brick 
and mortar spreads across suburban fields, the 
influence of the streets has flowed over the rustic 

i8i 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

mind and temper. Up to the time of our own 
recollection, the two principles kept a sort of 
balance, the rural simplicity and ruder strength, 
constantly drawn into the centre, maintained in 
mixture the best qualities of its proper force, and 
had in the making of the best English character a 
share insufficiently accounted of by most historians. 
Now the tide ebbs : London has brimmed over and 
run back over the old channels ; the farthest 
sources of the earlier supply are swamped — 
" imis Stagna refusa vadis " — by the universal 
Cockney soul. A literary instance will here serve 
better than anything else — as it usually will — to 
illustrate the change : set such essential townsmen 
as Pope, Addison, even Johnson beside our latest 
Arcadian versifier or romancist of the soil, and 
hear in the first the sonorous timbre of native 
speech, the racy birth-note and vernacular thought 
underlying and giving life to all the courtliness or 
wit ; in the second, observe the thin dentals of 
Cokayne all too clear beneath the disguise of 
studied dialect and sentiment. We are all Lon- 
doners now in our cradles, from Bow Bells to 
Berwick ; and be sure the sister kingdoms have 
their proper equivalents. The trouble which we 
call the Rural Exodus is, of course, an actual 
measure of the town's ascendency ; the decay of 
farming, already reduced in the nation's eyes to 
a make-believe industry, a mere appendage of 
sporting interests ; the characteristics of rural 

182 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

government and education, a ramification of nerve- 
less tentacles, possessing the chilly stringency of 
an octopus, with an inaccessible heart somewhere 
in Westminster or Whitehall ; all these things 
witness the destroyed balance, the new conditions 
of national life, the great experiment which is 
being made without data, whose possibilities are 
with one consent ignored. 

To take one of these classes of evidence — 
obvious enough, perhaps, to incur the oblivion 
now dealt to all primary and fundamental con- 
cerns — London — and here, of course, London 
stands for all towns of mass sufficient to exert that 
fatal attraction — can no more produce its own 
muscle or intellect than it can its mutton or its 
roses ; it must have its Smithfield for thews and 
its Covent Garden for brains, into which year by 
year pours the raw material for its manufacture. 
Failing the punctual supply from without, the 
country bone and blood to make policemen and 
porters, navvies and nursemaids, London would in 
a couple of months be stifled in its own decay. 
And the case is the same with mental repair ; cut 
off the supply of solid — call it stolid, if you prefer 
the word — temperament, easy-breathed and of 
steady nerves ; leave London for a twelvemonth 
to incubate its peculiar crasis ; and it would be 
one Bedlam. As surely as its bread and its drink- 
ing-water must come from green fields and clean 
skies, the bodies and souls which it consumes 

183 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

must be produced in regions beyond the reach of 
its contagion. And precisely as the tide of bricks 
and mortar ousts the last pretences of corn-growing 
in some half-rural suburb, so the spreading of the 
city-spirit over the country strikes at the supply of 
refective humanity. Corn and cattle we can fetch, 
for the present, from green fields elsewhere — even 
beyond the Atlantic ; do we contemplate a pro- 
vision of the other commodity from the samf. 
quarter ? As the matter stands, it appears — to an 
observer here in the wilderness, at least — that our 
imports of this sort, as seen about the Port of 
London, are not of a type likely to repair our 
losses satisfactorily ; but it would make no differ- 
ence if the finest samples of mankind procurable 
arrived regularly in Thames or Mersey. If our 
isles cannot raise a population of a certain weight 
and girth, a certain soundness and force of spirit, 
the game is already up, and our destinies have 
passed out of our own keeping. We in the 
wilderness discover from our newspapers and re- 
views that the people who live behind numbered 
doors, whose view of the country's corn supply 
does not, as a rule, go beyond the punctual baker's 
cart, begin at length to see the risks, in certain 
contingencies, of our not being self-supporting in 
the matter of national provender. Coleridge's 
warning in 1834, that in depending upon foreign 
corn we forget we are " subjugating the necessaries 
of life itself to the mere comforts and luxuries of 

184 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

society," is still in substance repeated ; but not 
often his condemnation as false and pernicious the 
" supposition that agriculture is not a positive good 
to the nation, taken in and by itself as a mode of 
existence for the people." If the Fates are patient 
with us, we may yet learn in time that it is 
ultimately not the corn raised by the man which 
matters, but the man fashioned by raising the 
corn. The simple fact that without the bodily 
exercise of the soil and the sea a wholesome race 
cannot be reared is, as far as any signs of practice 
go, completely ignored. 

Something in this sense, with the energy due to 
a favourite topic, and with a good deal of hauling 
the argument back into the right line from several 
sorts of tangential wandering, I had propounded 
to Mrs. Sims-Bigg, whose mental personality, if 
not by itself very distinguished, as a type may be 
said to touch the profound. 

" * Ignored,' indeed ! " she exclaims, with a 
suggestion of temper due, perhaps, to her not 
having had quite a fair share of the argument. 
*' ' Ignored ! ' when we are all trying to find how 
to keep the people on the land and prevent them 
crowding into the towns in that dreadful way ! I 
suppose you didn't read Lady Estridge-Sandys' 
article in last week's Leaven ? You ought to 
have been at a meeting I went to last week in 
Bossingham Gardens ; the speaking was admirable; 
the Bishop most stimulating, and Miss Blatherwayt 

185 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

— she works in Poplar, you know — so suggestive 
and helpful. * Ignored / ' " 

I said that it was one of the curiosities of the 
case that they were never tired of talking about 
the country ; but that the country was waiting to 
see something done. 

And who were ** they," might she inquire ? 

"The Town, Madam, that has been pleased to 
* take up ' the Country, and being almost entirely 
ignorant of its wants and meanings, governs it, 
thinks for it, paints it, writes about it " 

Mrs. Sims-Bigg smiles rather provocatively. 

"Ignorant of the country, are we? The best- 
trained and most advanced intellects are not able 
to grasp the ways of Little Pedlington, I suppose } " 

I answered that I thought they might, if they 
ever came to try. At present London constructed 
out of its inner consciousness one of the most 
curious dummies ever made to stand for live fact. 
The townsman's fundamental mistake in dealing 
with country affairs is his assumption of in- 
herent superiority. He has only to use his eyes : 
training ? sympathy ? acquirement of dialects of 
thought ? He smiles the suggestions aside ; what 
are the alertness and acuteness of the street-bred 
intellect worth, if they cannot dissect at a glance, 
dull, slow-moving Hodge ? And yet, if poor 
Hodge, wriggling quite disrespectfully under the 
forceps, should venture to question the value of 
the results, it might be found that the investigator 

1 86 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

had left something out of the account — protective 
devices such as Nature teaches the wild things ; a 
strange refraction of the lines of thought, produced 
instantaneously between the two types of mind by 
their different densities ; the exoteric forms of 
speech and expression, reserved for the aliens ; the 
seven-times- fenced-with-brass reserve. 

"'Reserve?'" says the opponent, with an in- 
tonation of reflective questioning. " Yes ; only 
some people would call it hopeless stupidity, I 
think." 

I told her that was, of course, the ground-fallacy 
of the whole position. If she would, just as an 
experiment, try to see that there is more than one 
scale of time, and that the straight line is not 
always the shortest : and would be ready to wait 
five or six years for the rustic nature to open 
itself out, and would not mind being laughed at 
meanwhile from behind the mask of what she 
called stolidity — with a few more such branches 
of learning — I should have hopes of her yet. 

** Thank you very much ! And your yokels, of 
course, see through us poor Cockneys as easily as 
possible all the time ? " 

I said I was quite sure of that. London views 
and London ways have a quite fatal easiness for 
Hodge. Our folk go up from the village very 
tolerable Arcadians spite of all the education they 
get, and come back in six months on a flying visit 
full graduate and most complete Cockneys. But 

187 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

is it imaginable, except in rare conjunctions, that 
a born and bred Londoner could in any length of 
time learn the ways of the village and the life of 
the fields ? The capacity which can " assimilate " 
the significance of the Borough or Hackney in a 
few weeks does not make much trouble of the 
solitary citizens that it may find straying in its 
fields. 

And how long, Mrs. Sims-Bigg would like to 
know, have I been in getting to know the ways 
of this mysterious race? Well, I have lived 
among them getting on for thirty years, summer 
and winter, without many days' holiday ; and I 
only know one or two here and there yet ; for 
the most part one can see something under the 
surface, and guess at all sorts of puzzles, and learn 
not to be very positive about anything, except 
perhaps the sure and certain truth that there is 
not much to be learned about the rustic in a full 
house-party at Frogswell Place, or even in a series 
of summer week-ends in the country. From this 
point I took the war into the enemy's country, 
and went on to enlarge upon instances of the 
Town's amazing ignorance of us and our little 
likes and dislikes — the beneficent regulations 
which apparently do not allow for any difference 
between the conditions of existence in Lambeth 
and on Lonewood Common ; the ghastly-laugh- 
able educational mixture which is served out alike 
to the small people in Rats' Rents, E., and to our 

1 88 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

little Joskins at Trucker's Hatch. I tried to point 
out the difference, as affecting character and the 
humanities, between living amid the flux of un- 
distinguishable millions and sojourning in a region 
where every face is perfectly familiar, and where 
every man's history is circumstantially known 
by each of his thirty or forty neighbours in the 
adjacent square mile of neglected fields. Was it 
not possible that the very simplicity of the life in 
the open air, the dealing with Nature and the 
elements very much at first hand, had its own 
gifts — intuitions and faculties in which we admit 
the ignoble savage to be our superior? Possible 
also that the streets, their restrictions of daylight 
and horizon, their ready-made provision, supplying 
all needs by the process of "going round the 
corner," took out of a man the qualities of 
initiative and resource, left in a large measure the 
machine-part behind ? 

I had begun to make some impression on my 
enemy's defences, as I judged by the perceptible 
decline of her interest in the discussion, when we 
came to the little wayside station, and I was able 
to tell her that I saw the cinnamon liveries and 
red wheels waiting behind the creeper-clad shanty 
which calls itself a booking-office. When the bays 
had gone by me in a cloud of dust, I struck into 
the field-path and found at once the tenfold charm 
of brooding quiet and such an impression of dear 
reality as daylight brings to the whirling fantasies 

189 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

of dreams. I mused as I went upon the Mrs. 
Sims-Biggs of the world, who know the country 
just as tourists on the highroad know the scenery 
about them — woods, fields, roofs, village spires in 
a general picturesque, a mere sliding background 
to their travel — never thinking how the prospect 
may strike the dwellers among those obscure field- 
paths and lonely woods, the folk to whom every 
tree is a landmark, every meadow and copse has a 
name and character, every house a history. These 
saunterers on the highway, flitting through their 
week-end visits, their country-house summers ; 
enjoying surface-pleasures of repose, of quaintness 
such as more saliently contrasts with the things of 
their habitude ; half-hearing a strange language of 
thought, guessing at meanings by help of their 
own book-knowledge and traditions : these very 
people are, by Fortune's spite, the historians and 
physiologists of the rural world. They have no 
misgivings that there are obscure motions in the 
rural system requiring half a lifetime for their 
parallax ; they make no allowance for refractions 
of vision and inconstant factors in calculation ; 
they generalise and confound such detail as the 
distinctions of class, as sharply cleft at the bottom 
of the scale as anywhere in the region of their own 
level ; they know nothing of the varying moral 
atmospheres of village and village, of the under- 
ground stirrings of political and social ideas acting 
on a purified democracy ever since the time 

190 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

**Ex quo sufiragia nulli 
Vendimus . . ." 

They are not concerned for the wiping out of 
the archaic and the picturesque — in far subtler 
ways than by church-restorations and the growth 
of " residential centres " — for the grey flattening 
and dulling of life coming on as quietly and com- 
prehensively as a November twilight, for the 
rubbing down of all salience of character and 
marked degrees of good or evil into a blurred 
mediocrity. They appear to think that country 
dispositions have stood still somewhere about the 
phase which Crabbe drew, in this connection not 
giving enough credit to our own energies for the 
effects they have succeeded in producing — that 
stupendous uniformity and inclusiveness of our 
schooling, the abandonment of the old national 
livelihood and its result in new and wholly experi- 
mental conditions, the breeding of a race mongrel 
between town and country, a state of intellectual 
suspense and anarchy, the old inheritance lost and 
the new maintenance still to seek. 

I had got so far in one more arraignment of the 
often sentenced offender when I met at the half- 
way heave-gate my old neighbour Jethro Tully on 
his way home to the Vachery, and found matter 
pertinent to the pleas in his salutation, in the 
complex meaning of the traditional deference and 
respect of lifelong use, crossed by a hint of 
Radical independence, in the veil of reserve rather 

191 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

sly than shy, lifted ever so little at one corner as 
a concession to sixteen years' acquaintance, in 
a fundamental good sense and native breeding 
underlying all. We stood to talk a minute as our 
custom is, and in his half-dozen scraps of gossip 
the old man showed signs of a ripe wisdom in 
matters, and a dry, somewhat censorious humour. 
" Density y^ quoth Mrs. Sims-Bigg ? Where is 
density like that of the brains over-centralised in 
some half-dozen square miles of foggy streets, 
minds whose rectangular plan of life and brick-wall 
horizon have dulled a whole province of perception, 
whose alternations of stuffy chambers and muddy 
pavements have plugged the finer senses as with 
an eternal catarrh ? Oh tyrant London, blear-eyed 
blunderer, coarse-thumbed handler of fine-spun 
destinies with whose right twining the very life of 
all that monstrous bulk is involved, learn before it 
is too late to lighten the touch of those ponderous 
fingers. Learn for your own sake that there are 
qualities not to be found in your ganglion of the 
national life, yet vital to the whole body, — reserve, 
caution, slow-seasoned grain and fibre, an absence 
of " nerves ; " learn that the nursery-ground of 
country solitude and silence is an essential pre- 
paratory to your forcing-house. You would 
understand, if you could but get the incantation 
of the " central roar " out of your ears, that the 
country is something more than a mere appendage 
of town, a convenient sanatorium or playgroun4 

192 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

for street-folk, a rubbish-heap for your waste 
humanity and bye-products of crime and insanity. 
We in the wilderness have already more than 
enough of your off-scourings ; now we hear of 
workmen's colonies, of factories to be brought out 
into the fields, to save the congestion of the centre. 
It is all incredibly foolish : artisans' plantations 
and cheap trains, boarded-out children, fortnights 
in the country, deported manufactures all merely 
cut the tree at the roots and foul the stream at the 
source. If London cannot be made in itself a 
habitable city, it may as well be asphyxiated at 
once in its own exhalations as try to elude the 
fates by pouring its filth into the one source of 
saving health which at present keeps it alive. 

The time will come, not a doubt of it, when the 
preservation of the country, body and soul, will 
quite suddenly appear to our governing orders as a 
really imperative thing ; and then that precise 
amount of energy will be spent in vain whose 
square-root would at a certain conjunction have 
comfortably secured the result. We shall recog- 
nise the country as at least an equal in partnership 
with the city ; there will be revolutions in methods 
of education and local government, and we shall 
see all manner of sumptuary laws and desperate 
encouragements of agriculture. Finally, we shall 
go forth in the guise of a Royal Commission to 
discover the lost secret of national existence ; and 
— unless some rare chance is to divert our usual 

193 O 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

mode — after much gathering and classifying of 
information, we shall find that we are just too late ; 
that the secret is buried somewhere in the unturned 
London Clay ; and as we go back to town through 
the waste fields we may perhaps catch an echo of 
the rumour once heard in an older Boeotia — 

aX\' ovv 6eovs 
T0V5 rrjs a\ov(rr)s irSXeos eKXelTreiv \6yo5. 

t "A whisper goes. 

The gods forsake the city to her foes." 



194 



XVIII 

September i. 
Coming home yesterday morning from a visit 
to old TuUy at the Vachery, I found myself, as I 
crossed the common at Beggar's Bush, engaged 
once more in an attempt which I knew at heart 
to be in vain, trying to make the familiar land- 
scape yield up something of the inner beauty 
which it can put forth at its own hours. The 
day was clear and keen, with a somewhat garish 
sun and quick-pacing cloud shadows ; all colour 
was pale and a little opaque. The long line of the 
Downs that lay like a grey vapour above the pale 
brown purples of the ridged Weald ; the clump of 
wind-bitten firs that tops the hill — a landmark 
that has taken its part in many an un forgotten 
composition — were alike otiose and inert. All 
endeavours to conjure the latent spirit by insisting 
on this piece of colour or that sweep of wooded 
valley only recoiled in a dull dissatisfaction ; and 
in due time I came to acknowledge that it was 
one of those days when a veil lies over the land- 
scape or some hebetude dulls the eye ; or when, 
3,s I have at times thought, there is some undivined 

195 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

collusion between the seer and the seen, and the 
vision is at once withheld and foregone. 

So for perhaps the hundredth time I gave up 
the attempt, and told myself once more how 
wholly vain is any purposed hunting for that finer 
spiritual beauty of a scene. The very thought of 
intent seems to shut sevenfold gates upon the 
magic realm that lies so close upon our road. 
Make your planned and deliberate expedition, a 
day's trudge through the hills — even a week in 
spring, it may be, among Surrey commons and 
green roads — and come home with your indolent 
recollection of things seen, commonplaces staled 
by a hundred old walks ; then, looking back by 
chance from your doorstep you shall see perhaps 
only a fast-fading streak of rosy cloud, the end of 
a sunset which had left you cold, or a mass of 
trees darkening against a rainy sky ; but at once 
you feel the touch of authentic divinity, a power 
to which your vacant perceptions answer instantly 
and absolutely. All the day you were a con- 
noisseur, a virtuoso, and Nature evaded you at 
every turn ; at the close you forget the quest, and 
she suddenly gives you a sign which in itself opens 
your eyes to see, a revelation which as it comes 
adds itself to the number of the unforgettable 
things. 

The day being, as I said, a dead one, I let my 
humour have its analytic bent. Those deeper 
manifestations have no discoverable law Qr rule ; 

196 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

at most it can be said of them that the degree of 
their power is connected with their suddenness and 
their transience. There is no season or hour when 
they may not be looked for; but perhaps there 
are some sorts of weather in which they are less 
likely to occur ; — times of repose and settled face, 
such as a sunless and windless November noon, 
a cloudless drought, or even those days of rich 
and sustained beauty, in the ordinary sense of the 
word, which almost always come in June. They 
are more frequent, no doubt, at the spring and the 
close of the day than in its middle ; but they are 
not dependent upon the more dramatic changes 
of light and colour : they are to be found not only 
in the sudden sunset-break which fires a mountain- 
side and fills the valleys with smouldering crimson 
mist, but in the quiet fall of a drenched autumnal 
evening, when the grass lightens a little to the 
slackening shower and a bar of greenish sky shines 
between the stems of the black-glooming wood. 
Even the dreariest of grey twilights may at the 
last moment lift a corner of the veil to show a 
mist-blurred star, a swarthy flush of afterglow, 
enough to let the ambient mystery in upon the 
spirit. 

The more a man betakes himself to watching 
and following the beauty of earth, the better he 
knows that it is not a constant quantity, as many 
seem to think, always at command the moment 
he goes out-of-doors. Any one who has paid 

197 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

his due service to the Ilissus or the Melian 
Aphrodite knows that even a statue has its 
moods ; as to the appeal of a landscape under 
the momentary changes of the season and the 
hour, it is strange if we shall catch it twice in 
altogether the same mode. The most we can 
do is to wait, keeping a clear mind, seeing to it 
that no internal distraction cloud or warp the 
mirror's surface. Though all deliberate intent 
most surely destroys its own ends, yet there are 
preparatories which contribute to the result — a 
" wise passiveness ; " idleness, in its too little 
understood virtuous side ; a temper of vacation 
perhaps innate ; an eye not bent formally on its 
object, but turned a little askance from it, finding 
it as stars fading in the daybreak may be found 
by looking a little beside them. There must be, 
of course, a general faith in the coming and going 
of divinity ; but no peering here and there for the 
symbols. The matter in hand most go on, like 
Nestor's sacrifice by the seashore ; the quiet 
morning hour proceed with its reverent common 
forms of the rite ; the lads must be there, the ox, 
the chieftain, the goldsmith with his tools ; and 
then, unheralded among the rest, silently, the last 
at the solemnity — 

Ipuu avTiSwara. 

But yesterday was altogether one of the fast- 
days, and I shut my door without having gained 

19S 



LONEVVOOD CORNER 

the least suggestion of any finer illumination be- 
hind the common scene. Something of the trivial 
hour seemed to infect the course of one's thoughts, 
and once or twice the doubt came whether all this 
care and observation of natural beauty is not, after 
all, a morbid activity, a crasis of the over-wrought 
modern mind. "You," said the ill-conditioned 
fancy, " mewed up with your books and your 
theories, palpitating at some one's review, or irri- 
tated by some one else's new adjective, it is you 
who breed these subtleties of vision and heats of 
appreciation. To the great old men who put down 
the foundations you pile your flimsy structures on, 
the world was well enough, the sky was blue and 
grass was green, sun and stars and seas and winds 
had their uses ; at most the sunrise or the storm- 
cloud got an epithet, a workmanlike label to serve 
through twenty-four books of epic. It is only 
now, when your neurotic multitudes, who never 
once in their lives drew a full breath or stepped a 
wholesome stride, it is only when the atrophied 
creatures huddle together in interminable streets 
that the sense of Nature-worship is born." 

The peevish thought was not to be answered 
off-hand. It is, after all, only the course of Nature 
that people who walk a certain length of familiar 
pavement day by day the year round, and see, if 
they ever look up, a narrow strip of firmament, 
hazy-blue in a garish sunlight or orange-dun in 
fog, should like to hear about green lanes and 

199 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

turquoise skies ; just as the converse holds good, 
that ninety-nine of the folk whose ways lead, 
summer and winter, through green lanes, and 
whose roof from light to dusk is the open heaven, 
quite largely fail to appreciate the beauties spread 
about them. It is, perhaps, not too rude a pro- 
position to say that the expatiation is in inverse 
proportion to the knowledge. It seems as though 
the difference in detail of scene-painting between 
the moderns and the older men were connected 
with the degree of intimacy with Nature possessed 
by their several publics. The archaic colourist, 
writing for his sunburnt, outdoor critics, set his 
conventional mark on sea or sky — otvoiri TrovTrfji 
or aaireTog alOrtp ; it is left to the modern Acade- 
mician to give us — breathing the dusty smell of 
the reading-room while the electric lights sicken 
in the shrouding fog — a sky " or sur or ; les nuages 
d'un or clair et comme incandescent sur un fond 
byzantin d'or mat et terni," or " la mer . . . d'une 
certaine nuance bleu paon avec des reflets de mdtal 
chaud." In face of such achievements as these, it 
seems hardly doubtful that our seers and prophets 
— wheresoever their hearers may stand — have dis- 
covered whole new worlds in the notation of 
natural beauty. Yet there are arguments in the 
contrary sense which at least deserve a hearing. 
We are, perhaps, too ready to impute to all other 
ages our peculiar manner of putting all our strength 
in the front rank, or, to use a comparison that is 

200 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

perhaps apter to the case, all our wares in the 
window ; it rarely seems to occur to us that there 
may be any limit to an author's reach other than 
his power. It is at least possible that Homer's 
sea had that monotonous wine-colour, instead of 
peacock-blue and all the rest of the inexhaustible 
palette, by a quite deliberate choice. 

And the earlier fashion of summary notation has 
evident virtues of its own ; it may be found to be 
the only possible vehicle for the conveying of those 
rarer manifestations of light and form, always swift 
and evanescent in proportion to their force. In 
the nice choosing of adjectives, the search for 
synonyms and the projection of minute detail 
there lies the risk that the impatient spirit elude 
us, and we find the image we would record hang 
as a dead weight of matter on our hands. A 
single classic phrase — an epithet, even — may sug- 
gest more than a page of laboured " word-painting" 
can realize : the one is allusive, an indication, so 
to say, between friends with a common stock of 
quick-answering knowledge ; the other too often 
seems but a careful and partly conscious endeavour 
to convey the detail of a scene to minds which 
cannot take a hint, nor fill in an outline from the 
stores of their own memory. One line of the 
classics may present, to the man who knows, a 
sense of the thing meant, much in the same way, 
and as absolutely, as the wet blur or solid blot of 
Turner's latest power gives its sense, with a kind 

201 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

of shorthand which alone is quick enough for the 
fading light or the flung-out curve. That qualify- 
ing clause " to the man who knows," is perhaps the 
key to the difference between the two methods. 
The man who has the breath to take him up 
mountain-sides, and the eyes, when the summit 
is gained, to look behind him and below, does not 
need a chapter to recall the vision when he has 
come down to the plain again ; a line, a pregnant 
word will be enough ; Pindar's 

'Ap/caStas airh Seipav 
Kat 'iro\vyvdinrT(t}v /xvx^iv. 

or, to fetch a parallel from the other extreme of 
the compass, Martial's 

Et curvas nebula tegente valles 

will afford him all he needs. 

So far went my analysis, filling up, as such 
exercises are surely meant to do, the dead spaces 
wherein we know no gods <^aivovrat Ivapyng. 
During the afternoon, given solidly to the garden, 
there were intimations that the day and the 
personal humour were both shaping towards better 
things. About dusk, when the digging had been 
fairly put through, I took a turn along the high- 
road and dropped a little way down the first steep 
pitch of Withypits Lane ; and there, with my 
mind mainly running, I think, on the couch-grass 
roots which I had been wrestling with, I came 
upon, or there came upon me, in the dull close of 

202 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

the undistinguished day upon the landscape seen 
a thousand times before, such a vision of inner 
beauty as I had tried to evoke all through the 
morning's walk. The scene was but the plan of 
the hillside over against me, the steep fields that 
drop to the brook in the bottom, the remembered 
pattern of their hedges, their solitary oaks, the 
long wood that crowns the ridge : in how many 
evening walks had I seen it all under the last of 
the sunset, darkening to a plane of dun-green 
shade, utterly silent and without the least stirring 
of life ? I had turned out of the lane, a few paces 
across the grass to the familiar gateway, and as I 
leaned on the grey lichen-shagged bar the senses 
— not immediately, but after a minute's looking — 
suddenly penetrate or are penetrated ; the world 
is transformed to a visage it never showed before, 
and will not show again. The smooth green fields, 
the dark mass of the wood, the pale spaces of sky 
and barred cloud reaching towards the north in a 
moment put forth their hidden power. One can 
but look and look, drawing quiet breath as though 
uninitiate and unawares chancing upon some 
temple - mystery ; the slack-ordered thoughts, 
tangled a moment ago between a half-mechanic 
recollection of something heard or read, and the 
lazy aim that switched at the nettles in the hedge, 
fall at once into a wide-eyed calm, the very spirit 
of receptiveness, a lulling pleasure into which they 
sink as into the depths of happy-dreaming sleep. 

203 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

Every part of the scene is wrought to a meaning 
of serene good ; the hedged fields, the white cot- 
tage that shows like a light on the dusky green of 
the pastures, signify the grace of life in ordered 
work and ease ; the mounded oaks stand like 
towers of solemn strength ; the earth-haze above 
the fallen sun, swarthy orange with the reek of 
the dead day, cannot stain the immense clearness 
of the western sky. Such things as these, the 
approaches and degrees to the central light, come 
back to the mind that tries to recall the vision 
when it has passed : the supreme mythus divined 
behind the symbol is beyond the speech even of 
thought. 

The lifted veil quickly falls again. The fire dies 
out of the afterglow, the clouds fade from their 
last pale purples to cold grey ; but spite of the 
visible passing of the glory, the watcher surmises 
of a shadow that rises within himself; the senses 
tire, under the stretch of a greater effort of per- 
ception than he had conceived of. The vision 
passes ; but just before it goes, there comes a 
motion of the will to grasp and hold the moment 
as it falls away, a sudden pang of regret, irrational 
and unaccountable, akin to that strong pathos 
which sometimes comes in watching the highest 
human beauty. It is easy to think of this as the 
mere heart-ache for our own transitoriness set 
against the changeless shows of earth ; but those 
who have felt it think that goes deeper than any 

204 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

syllogism of our making, has a reference beyond 
this frame of things. 

When past any doubt the illumination is over, 
there is perhaps a momentary endeavour to catch 
the secret again, as one sometimes wishes to catch 
the broken end of a dream. But the thought is 
abandoned as it comes ; it is best to turn resolutely 
away from the gate and leave the uninspired face 
of the hillside, the mist rising along the brook, the 
last glimmer of the west between the pillars of the 
wood. Turn away up the lane again ; and while 
you feel a sort of wonder at an ineffectiveness, a 
sense of fault in all you see, in the dully reddening 
ranges of eastern cloud, in the uncouth shapes of 
trees, in the landscape where thwarted Nature and 
the indolent works of men interact in a confused 
meanness, let the mind go back along the trace of 
the lost beauty, perhaps to find a consolation, per- 
functory but not unserviceable for the darkened 
way, in the fancy of some inheritance or right, 
implied in that vain regret. 



205 



XIX 

September lo. 
It is a weary business waiting for rain in a droughty 
summer, watching morning after morning the cloud- 
less blue, or worse, the illusory shows of breaking 
weather and blessed showers in the windward, 
which raise and dash our hopes from hour to hour. 
There is a last worst state, when hope is tired, 
or too wise to stir, when the harm is done, the 
broccoli or the begonias past recovery, and the 
ultimate downpour becomes a matter of compara- 
tive indifference. It is not very good for the 
temper to muse in this strain amid one's wilting 
greenstuff and dusty seed-beds, while the very 
privets and laurels hang limp leaves, and the lawn 
is seared to a greyish brown. Walks across fields 
and by wood paths are better than the accustomed 
saunterings in one's own domain ; the whole 
country is waste and sere, and the time is an 
interregnum ; the stubbles are too hard for the 
plough, the meadows are fed almost bare ; the 
woods stand a dark and lifeless green and begin 
to drop their leaves, shrivelled before they ar^ 

206 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

faded. It is not a much happier prospect than 
the garden offers ; but at least one leaves one's 
private responsibilities behind one at the gate. 
I was out lately on one of these turns towards 
the Vachery, and fell in with Mrs. Ventom on her 
way home from market. The pony having cast 
a shoe, she had walked and carried her butter 
baskets all the way to Tisfield. The burden had 
taken nothing out of the spring of her step or 
the spare uprightness of her carriage ; but I think 
it had contributed to a slight and quite permissible 
roughness in her temper. An encounter in the 
market with some one who, I judged, must have 
been awEipoKaXog, unblest with the finer instincts, 
seemed to have ruffled her wonted calm. The 
lady — whose butter was notorious in all the parish, 
whose whole experience came out of half a dozen 
County Council lectures on dairying — had in open 
market expressed doubts as to the keeping quali- 
ties of the Burntoak consignment, and had advised 
Mrs. Ventom — Mrs. Ventom — to use more salt, 
and take more care about the making up. " I had 
it on my tongue to say something we should 
both have been sorry for; but there," says the 
widow, "I thought of her mother, that I taught 
to make butter long before she was thought of: 
one of the old sort, before they'd been long enough 
away from Nymans to forget what they'd been 
themselves. Well-to-do people, the Luxfords 
always were, of course ; but the grandfather just 

207 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

a tenant farmer. The old people were not the 
sort to shake their pockets at you, though they 
came into money twice, and had more than they 
rightly knew what to do with. There's hundreds 
more about like her now ; and 'tis only themselves 
out of the whole country that don't know the 
difference from the real old families. Some learn 
it quicker than others ; there's the Miss Walcots, 
now : their grandfather was miller at Westingham 
when the Luxfords were at Nymans, but they're 
the real thing right through — leastways Miss 
Fanny is : and Mrs. Sims-Bigg, she'd never be 
what you'd call a lady, not if she lived to be a 
hundred. And it's not so much what she said. 
I've known people a good deal rougher with their 
tongues, that you knew were all right the first 
word they spoke. Look at Miss Enderby, now ; 
she can be sharp enough, but you've only got 
to hear her and Mrs. Sims-Bigg together. But 
she can be sharp, too. She was up at Burntoak 
last week, and she saw two texts that I'd put up 
over the dresser ; my niece had sent them me — 
* Cast thy burden,* and ' Though I walk through 
the valley,' all in colours and gilt — pretty, I 
reckoned them — and she said, *I see you're like 
other folk ; nailing up texts on the wall out of 
the way, so's you shouldn't break your shins over 
them.' But the sharpest thing I ever heard her 
say was to the Vicar, when we'd been talking 
about Tom Finch, that robbed his grandmother 

208 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

of her bit of savings, and his wife that used to 
shut the children out at night, and pumped on 
the little one when it was freezing. * It's only 
very cruel people,' she said, * that don't believe 
in Hell.* The Vicar coughed, and said something 
about Christian charity. He'd been much too easy 
with the Finches all along, some people thought ; 
and Miss Mary looked at him as she knows how 
to look, and said, * I wasn't thinking of Tom Finch 
and his wife, Mr. Blenkinsopp.' It's not so much 
what's said," Mrs. Ventom radically concludes, 
" it's the one that says it." I thought of Pamela 
Andrews' view of the matter : " but they are ladies, 
and ladies may say anything.'* 

All this was unwontedly philosophic for the 
mistress of the farm ; and we soon came down 
to more solid ground. The drought is a sore 
burden ; water has to be carried to the stock from 
the brook half a mile away, and the house-supply 
has given out. " There's damp enough under the 
floors," says Mrs. Ventom ; " I couldn't keep a 
carpet on the bricks in the kitchen, if I wanted 
to : as I told the agent the last time I sent the 
rent, the well's about the only dry place on the 
property. And next week, for all we know, we 
may have the floods out in the bottoms, and 
buckets in the best bedroom to catch the wet 
coming through the roof. We're always in trouble 
one way or the other. Most people seem to think 
trouble can only hurt you one way ; but," says 

209 p 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

the widow, with one of her material comparisons 
from the works of Nature, ** 'tis like boot-laces ; 
it frets us if they're too tight, and it frets us pretty- 
nearly as much if they're too loose.'* 

By this we had come to the path which cuts 
the meadows towards Burntoak, and our ways 
parted. I held the gate open for Mrs. Ventom 
and her baskets, and received one of her magni- 
ficent sweeping curtseys, baskets and all, that 
majestic sinking and recovery which I should sup- 
pose would make Mrs. Sims-Bigg's fortune at a 
Drawing-Room — the hereditary obeisance which 
the widow maintains in a sort of jealous pride — I 
had almost said insolence — in knowing her station ; 
it is possible that it has for her a connection with 
old fashions, greater than ours ; in some cases, 
perhaps, it might express a lurking sarcasm. I 
should like very much to have seen the curtsey 
she gave Mrs. Sims-Bigg in Tisfield market after 
that reflection on the Burntoak butter. 

When I came to the Vachery I found Jethro 
TuUy thatching one of his own clover stacks. The 
one decent thatcher in the parish was busy at 
Naldretts fresh-healing the barn. TuUy was not 
going to have his job done by either of the 
other two impostors who profess the craft. So, as 
rain might come along any time, he reckoned as 
how he'd got to do it himself. I sat on the stack- 
yard rails and watched him finish off the job, 
quick, thorough, neat-handed work, without waste 

2IO 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

or haste. Here was skilled labour, at any rate — 
the drawing out of the straw from the heap, the 
laying of it straight with light, quick fingers, the 
fastening of the bundle in the clam, or carrier, 
the quantity exactly sufficient for the space to 
be covered, judged after an instant's measurement 
with the eye from below ; the unhesitating laying 
on, combing down and binding in with the thatch- 
ing-rods ; the finishing touches to the edges with 
the shears; all this very pleasantly satisfied my 
taste for seeing anything thoroughly well done. 
When Tully had the whole thing to his mind, he 
came over to where I was sitting, straightening him- 
self very gingerly ; and leaning on the fence, began 
to accuse the disjointed times which reduced him, 
with twenty other things to look after, to thatch- 
ing his own stacks. It was all depressingly per- 
spicuous ; the old ones, that had learnt what work 
meant, dropped off one by one, and the young 
ones were never taught naun but school-learning, 
and smoking cigarettes and sarcing their betters. 
*Tis all made easy for 'em now; but he reckons 
there's some things as is only to be learned by 
hard work and taking pains. He used to walk 
three miles to his work every day at his first 
place, and that meant getting up at four, and back 
after seven. He was put on to mow with the 
men when he was seventeen ; and you got to keep 
up with 'em somehow, and learn to sharp properly. 
There isn't a boy in the school now, he 'spects, 

211 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

that could sharp a scythe or a hook, let alone 
mow. They don't look to things; 'tis all ready- 
made and take-it-easy ; why ne'er he nor his 
father afore him ever botcght a scythe-sned ; they'd 
look out for a likely piece of hazel when they 
were in the woods, and then at the right time 
they'd go and cut it for themselves. And choosing 
a scythe-blade, now ; people didn't seem to see 
no difference. Well, when he went to pick one, 
he'd wait for a sunshiny day, and hold it up 
'twixt him and the sun, so's the light fell on the 
edge, and then, if it looked as blue as a hare- 
bell, you could be pretty sure that was a good 
one. So with knives; he'd often been asked to 
choose 'em for people, when he was going into 
Tisfield. 

I thought of the thing defined as an infinite 
capacity for taking pains, and wondered what 
polar quality may be denoted by a nation's being 
mainly concerned to avoid all sort of pains or 
trouble whatsoever. TuUy, I think, would have 
no hesitation as to its results ; there is the con- 
crete product before his eyes in the shape of his 
grandson Herbert or Erb. Erb, at the age when 
his grandfather was set to weed in the fields and 
mind horses, began to exercise his mind with re- 
creative beads and bits of stick under a Government 
syllabus, and thereafter grew nine years in the 
atmosphere of the school stove and the odour of 
unscrubbed humanity, under the influence of the 

212 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

blackboard and its chalky duster, and so became 
qualified to parse and do mental arithmetic and 
sing sol-fa, until he is projected complete upon 
the world, an under-sized, weedy cub, with small 
show of manners or morals, with one gift of shirk- 
ing laziness developed in his atrophied little brain. 
He has been sent away to three or four good 
places, and after a few weeks in each is back again 
with his cigarette and his halfpenny paper on the 
wall by the pond, the gathering-place for all the 
tribe of skulkers, already something of a parish 
care and nuisance. If he had had the learning 
of him, says old Tully, he'd have made something 
different of him. For my part, I doubt it. I 
cannot picture to myself Erb turning out at five 
o'clock, keeping up with the mowers, or learning 
to choose a scythe : the creature that I know, 
under-sized and ill-knit, bleached by indoor air 
and soul-stunted by indoor thinking, with his 
stick-up collars and fourpenny satin ties, his 
cherished forelock, his language and his literature, 
is of another birth, a changeling from the stock 
of those old breakers of the glebe. He judge a 
scythe-blade by the blue glimmer on the edge? 
He can't even distinguish the tastes of the various 
poisons in his cigarettes. 

They wonH work nowadays, says Tully ; not on 
the land. They don't seem to mind dirty jobs, 
or being in shops, and all that ; but what he calls 
real pleasant work, they won't have naun of it. 

213 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

I remind him of a modern instance. Our neigh- 
bours at Tisfield have — after the usual preliminaries 
of a newspaper warfare, party-committees, insinua- 
tions and recriminations, a Local Government 
Inquiry and a loan — embarked upon an ambitious 
scheme of drains. During the laying of the main 
sewer they managed to asphyxiate one navvy in 
the drain, and to blow another to tatters with a 
dynamite cartridge. The applicants for the 
vacancies thus created were ten deep ; but as 
Tully says, for real pleasant work you can hardly 
get a man to look at the job. He reckons it's 
better for a man to be on the top of a stack than 
down a sullage-pipe ; but there, you can't never 
tell. Seems as if they were reg'lar frightened of 
being out-o'-doors now. 

I told him that people had lately proposed that 
agriculture should be taught in country schools. 
He smiled a little stiffly, as one smiles at the bad 
jokes of one's friends ; and then I quoted the 
opinion of a great doctor of educational science 
which I had lately read, denouncing as reactionary 
and obscurantist any attempt to specialise the 
curriculum of elementary education before the age 
of fourteen. I put it to Tully in less specialised 
English than is usually affected by the people who 
call themselves educationalists, and was pleased 
to find that the objection which had occurred to 
me was the first in his mind. "'Tis people like 
that," says Tully, "that are killing the country. 

214 



LONEWOOD CORNER 



.\. 



I don't set out to know how any one can be such 
a fool as to think ye can start to teach a boy 
farming when he's fourteen, let alone filling his 
head with everything else first that he won't never 
want ; but there, if you tell me as the gentleman 
said it, I suppose 'tis so ; but I do reckon people 
like that ought to be shet up." Shutting-up, in 
Tully's mouth, has not the mere colloquial sense 
of suppression : it means Bedlam ; and when one 
thinks a little on that excited defence of the 
existing plan of extreme specialisation, by which 
a boy is sedulously nursed into the desire of 
a black coat and an office stool, and a taste 
for halfpenny periodicals, and then, with this 
precious birthright assured to him, is left to follow 
the plough if he will, one is inclined to agree 
with Tully's prescription, unless it may seem 
under the imminent conditions simpler and more 
economical to provide well-fenced strongholds for 
one's self, and to leave the crazy world to run 
at large. 

There was a little silence, and then Tully's 
justly balanced mind began to bring up from the 
stores of memory some of the less favourable 
aspects of the days of old. "Not but what," he 
began, " I don't say as there's not improvements 
some ways since I can remember, and since what 
I've heard my father tell of. I 'spect it was a bit 
rougher than what we should care for now. I 
can rec'lect the girls doing the washing out in 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

the yard in the winter, with their skirts froze hard 
about their knees, and they wore short sleeves 
then, and they'd sometimes chilblains right up to 
their elbows ; and get two pounds a year for that. 
And the boys got knocked about a bit, too. 
Seemed they didn't think so much about things 
then. I rec'lect when there was no ceiling to the 
church roof, and the snow used to come right 
through into the chancel ; the clerk he used to 
sweep it off the seats before service. There was 
none of these stoves then ; and Parson Short, I've 
seen him blowing his fingers while they was sing- 
ing the Psalms. It was rougher still in my father's 
time, I 'spect That was when the war was on, 
and the French prisoners was kept at the old 
Talbot ; old Jack Lelliot he'd often baked their 
dinners for them, and sometimes they'd catch a 
toad in the garden and put it in one of their pies. 
The press-gang was going about then, and you 
durstn't send a waggon to Lewes with two men, 
for fear they'd take one of 'em ; if there was but 
one with the horses, they couldn't take him, you 
see. And highwaymen : the corn-market at Tis- 
field used to be at six o'clock in the evening, 
so's they could hear the price of corn in London ; 
and sometimes when the farmers were going home, 
they were set on. My grandfather was once 
driving his trap from the market, betwixt Harvest 
Hill and Pain's Bottom, and he saw three men 
waiting to stop him : so he cut the horse, and 

2i6 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

sent one of *em flying, and went through without 
they touched him. And there's another thing 
that's improved : about the tithe. They used to 
take it in kind ; I used to know the last tithing- 
man, when I was a boy : Freeman Blaker they 
called him, and he lived in Sher'n'am, where the 
post-office is built now. He'd come in harvest 
time and stick a bough in every teijth sheaf, and 
he'd have the tenth pig when there was a litter, 
and every tenth day the whole of the milk. I 
can tell you my father was pretty glad when the 
Commutation came in, and it was all done away 
with. People didn't take to the tithing ; and can 
you blame them ? If they was harvesting beans, 
or anything like that, they'd sometimes put the 
tithe sheaves in a bit of a stack, like, in a wood, 
and leave them there, and the poor people'd go 
and help themselves, and you couldn't blame 
them. And when the old tithe-barn that used 
to stand next the church was burnt down, there 
was nobody sorry, and some reckoned they knew 
pretty well how it came to catch fire. I've heard 
Parson Short say as how those that first gave the 
tithe had brought the Church more curses than 
they ever did good. Well, there's things like that 
where there's great improvements ; but come to 
look at the boys and the gells — ay, and the men 
and women too — what they was then, and what 
they set out to be now, and 'tis an improvement 
all the other way." 

217 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

At this point we left the State to look after 
itself, and turned to our private concerns — the 
neighbouring field of swedes starved for want of 
rain, the wells drained of their last muddy residue, 
the disjointed cycle of rain and fine. Before we 
had finished, the horses came in from the fields, 
and Tully had to go and see to their stabling. I 
turned for home, thinking as I crossed the stale 
dry fields and sapless woods of TuUy's balances 
of better and worse, of prices to pay for things 
to have, of labour and wages, of the see-saw of 
reacting extremes upon which we live, making it 
our religion to drive each recoil more violent than 
the last. I entertained a vision of our public men 
doing their best to bring that vicious libration to 
a stand, instead of using all their weight to make 
the machine kick the beam for their party ends. 
We shall have to overcome a number of old pre- 
scriptions and prejudices first, no doubt, breach 
several bulwarks and rape sundry Palladiums 
of progress ; but surely there are already signs 
of decay in some of those hedges of divinity, 
and the change may be nearer than we con- 
ceive. 

I had taken a short cut through some pastures 
which landed me in face of an old stake and wattle 
fence ; the crumbling bank and half-rotten lattice 
of stick and bramble made as awkward a barrier 
as short cut ever led to. I scrambled over at last, 
somehow; and as I stopped to clear myself of 

218 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

thorns and litter from the hedge, I said to myself, 
with a parallel such as Mrs. Ventom would not 
have disdained, that it might be ten times easier 
to get over a stiff new fence than a rotten old one, 
after all. 



219 



XX 

September i8. 
An occasional invasion from the outer world serves 
very comfortably to settle the cloistered mind in 
its opinion of the goodness of its solitude. Thus 
when lately on a mild autumnal afternoon the 
Sims-Biggs and Mrs. Yarborough-Greenhalgh and 
her daughters chanced to jump with one another 
at teatime in one of their half-yearly calls at 
Lonewood, and found the Warden and Mary 
Enderby and Harry Mansel, who had come up 
to fetch certain flower-seedlings for The Laurels, 
my groves resounded for half an hour to a very 
tolerable imitation of the shouting cross-fire which 
in these last times passes for conversation. The 
reign of peace was all the fuller when the tumult 
came to an end, and I dare say one's wits were 
all the better for an involuntary souse in a breaker 
of that great tide on the shore of which I am wont 
to bask and murmur my suave mart. The Warden, 
my cousin, and Harry stayed on after the others 
had gone, and we went down the garden to get the 
columbines and pansy roots, and talked in our own 
way. Mary, I thought, bore a little hardly on the 

220 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

young man, who was to carry the basket down to 
the village for her, with glance-hits at his extreme 
nicety of get-up, and his searching knowledge of 
the proprieties of life. The youth took it all excel- 
lently, with a show of ingenuous modesty ; but 
I doubt if my cousin perceived a tinge of humour 
in his gravity which meant that he quite under- 
stood, and though playing feather-light, could 
easily guard his head. Mary has been pleased 
to consider him as seriously wanting in brains 
and a danger to his country, ever since he failed 
rather ostentatiously to respond to an attempt to 
communicate something of her admiration for 
Molly Crofts. She has told me that he was made 
in a mould; that there were some thousands of 
boys exactly like him in the British Army ; and 
I told her if that was so, to thank Heaven that the 
country was not in such a bad way as some patriots 
were pleased to think. 

The Warden turned back with me when we had 
seen Mary and her squire out at the field gate, and 
we sat and smoked under the holly hedge till the 
light began to fade. We ranged over a good deal 
of country before coming round to the inevitable 
master-theory. The Warden vented a little fume 
which he had been obliged to keep to himself 
when lately consulted by a committee of our 
intellectual ladies on the choice of books for a 
course of lectures and reading which exhilarates 
the winter months in our region. They had, of 

221 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

course, made up their minds before they asked him, 
he says, and were going to plunge into Marcus 
Aurelius and Epictetus: of course, they never 
heard of Antoninus, and they call it Epictetus ; 
but that doesn't make any odds. There must 
be something in stodge like that to attract the 
average female mind. He thinks most probably 
It's the want of humour. The real sense of 
humour is the admission of the incalculable, 
something elastic in the brain which will stand 
the shock when two and two don't make four. 
Of course, in a purely scientific age like ours, we 
can't expect any admission of that sort. It's a 
general plague : think of a sensible woman like 
Lady Anne, or nice girls like Molly bothering 
their heads about those two old fifth-raters or 
their modern equivalents, and ignoring all the 
real live stuff. He had talked to Molly about it : 
but it was no good ; they'd got it all down in a 
syllabus now, with lectures by some poor devil 
who is trying to make a living at once out of his 
First in History. ^^ Molly said it was so stimu- 
lating, and I told her it didn't sound intoxicating, 
anyhow. They had been discussing Marcus's 
views of immortality, and I told her he was one 
of those people who can only think of infinity 
in one direction, as if it didn't go both ways, 
behind as well as in front ; and that we forget 
that God is as much smaller than we are as 
He is greater. I thought that would be a 

222 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

stimulus, but Molly thought she was shocked. 
We are so serious now, that we can't imagine 
where the fun comes in to anything, even about 
ourselves. Our work is so strenuous and earnest 
that we are always in the thick of it, and can 
never stand back to get the general perspective. 
Look at the way Montaigne always keeps the 
scale of things, and can laugh at himself and 
everything else when he likes. But then he'd 
been in the world. He must have thought, some- 
times, how his dealings with the Ligue, and the 
Mairie, and affairs like the muster of the troops in 
Bordeaux, would count towards getting a hearing 
from the right kind of people in time to come. 
We never get a philosopher now among the men 
of action. What opportunities even a man like 
Harry Mansel has with his Ghurkas in the Hills, 
and back at home every other year or so ! It 
makes one sick of one's theories, nursed up on 
stale ground for fifty years together. There's a 
boy that has lived : two campaigns for his country 
before he's twenty-seven, snubbed and starved 
by the politicians till they want him every now 
and then to clean up the messes they have made. 
He's helping to shove the waggon, and we sit 
inside and squabble about education and efficiency. 
Brains? Aren't there kinds of brains, as well as 
sizes ? Do you think we poky liKle people who 
sit at home annotating the classics, and wasting 
paper in offices, and lecturing to ladies on Epictetus, 

223 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

could manage a hill-tribe that was turning nasty ? 
I don't say there aren't set-offs on the other side. 
It's a pity Harry should have dropped his classics 
altogether since he left Sandhurst ; but one can't 
have everything. I suppose it's all our personal 
freedom and high culture and precise thinking that 
prevent us having any Montaignes now. But we 
could do with one or two: the solemn strenuous 
people are not much good even at lectures ; but 
when it comes to the whole government of a 
country being made of them, it is really rather 
awful. It isn't always easy to make out the 
compensatory advantages, when you get a fact 
like that to think about." 

We were once more in the neighbourhood of the 
familiar solution, and the final stages of its develop- 
ment lasted until I had seen the Warden out of the 
lower gate, and had lost him at the turning of the 
field-path into the road. The theory ran still in 
my head for a little as I came back up the garden, 
thinking of an old contrast which balanced Mon- 
taigne against Plato : the Greek, with a divine 
stillness about him, knowing spells of strange 
power, shines with an anointing that eludes human 
holds ; Montaigne is one of ourselves, goes down 
into the pit with us, puts on him the dust of 
mortality for the wrestler's sand. . . . 

From a flight or two such as this I came down 
to the still September evening, the just- risen moon, 
near the full, hanging above the eastern woods, 

224 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

the autumn flowers in the dusking borders, and 
the first smell of autumn leaves. My associative 
recollection answered at once to that mixture of 
impressions, and the shadowy rampart of the 
Downs turned as I looked at it to AUington 
Hills, the first horizon I knew beyond the bounds 
of garden-hedges or nursery window-panes — to 
AUington Hills as I used to see them across my 
first river of Sandwell stream. Both river and 
hills were part of a magic country, lying within 
a morning's walk of the common earth of lessons 
and bedtime and rainy days indoors. Sandwell, 
in his degree, and among civil streams, was surely 
one of the noblest that ever flowed — crystal clear, 
neither fast nor slow, equable both in drought 
and flood. Frost never bound him, for he had in 
him some volcanic temper, so that in hard weather 
his windings lay under a white veil of smoke ; and 
no fieriest dog-star had power to abate him an inch 
of his pride. Not for many a day did I discover 
that he came to us through no old kingdoms and 
far-off lands, not even through long valleys of our own 
shire, but in his main artery sprang at once to full 
span from the confluence of three rushing streams 
welling up marvellously amongst the houses and 
gardens of the village. The amplest of the three 
heads was housed in a sort of temple, the eight- 
sided red-brick well-house, always close-shut and 
mysterious, full of the sound of invisible springs. 
Another source came wavering into the light from 

225 Q 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

under a low dark archway in a park wall, and ran 
over yellow gravel alongside the highroad ; the 
third I never traced to its spring, somewhere 
among the cottage gardens in Church Lane. The 
three main heads joined to make a broad shallow 
pool in the middle of the village, and at the outflow 
Sandwell began. Its silent stealth made it seem 
unfathomable to my early fancy ; I must have 
been twelve years old before its olive-green deeps 
resolved themselves into a good mid-thigh in full 
channel. In holiday time I used to fish the stream 
with a good deal of application, but with an incur- 
able and perfectly conscious unhandiness, and a 
consistent ill-luck which may have had a share in the 
making of a certain habit of acquiescence in failure, 
hardly proper for that age, but immoveable. There 
was a stretch called Dodgson's Piece, along one 
side of Mill Green Lane, which was free-warren 
and haunted in summer holidays by all the boys 
who could contrive a hazel-rod and crooked pin. 
There the trout were scarcely larger than minnows, 
and of a marvellous activity ; but look over the 
upper Town Bridge or the lower Meadow Bridge, 
which marked the limits of the public water, and 
there in the cool privacy of lawns and gardens, 
under the very shadow of the arch, you saw the 
waving tails of the three-pounders who knew their 
station to an inch, and never showed a nose on 
the plebeian side. For a year or two I flogged 
the edges of the vt^eed-beds with every sort of 

226 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

home-made tackle, and after a certain birthday 
with a fine fly-rod out of the little barber's shop on 
the Mill Green ; but I had learned my capacity, 
and presently turned to less exacting arts. The 
hills were my second pleasure; in the less active 
humours even dearer than Sandwell itself. Long 
before I had ever got any nearer to them than the 
river bank, they seemed to call me, stirring vague 
longings as the frontier of another world, a magic 
land where I fain would be. When at length I 
came to climb the heathy swell and stand upon 
the ridge, there away in the south, beyond the 
long fir-woods that sank below me, over the broad 
plain that stretched beyond, no nearer than they 
had been before, rose again the blue hills far away. 
Between the river and the hills lay the little town 
that still called itself "The Village," roofs half 
hidden among orchard boughs, old park elms, a 
grove of broad cedars. Beyond the houses came 
the open country, level hedgeless fields, softly blue 
at the season with acres of flowering lavender. All 
this realm lay towards the sun, away from the 
region of ever thickening roads and houses, and 
was on the edge of the real country ; it was kept 
for Saturday walks and day-long rambles in the 
boundless ease and peace of mind of the first weeks 
of summer holidays ; journeys that were always 
made, as it seems now, together with Barbara des 
Voeux. Those were the days when the chance of 
next-door houses made us fellow-prisoners at sums 

227 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

and French, and constant mates at playtime in the 
back gardens or on Allington Hills. Over Sand- 
well by the Meadow Bridge a lane led, turning 
presently into a cart-track through the fields that 
were always rich with the smell of widths of 
peppermint and always abloom, as they remain in 
memory, with the soft violet under-heaven of the 
lavender ; and next into a high-hedged blackberry 
lane, winding and rising steeper and sandier till 
heather and fern took the place of the brambles, 
and all at once, over a bank of white pebbly sand 
topped with flaming gorse, rose the dark stretches 
of the glorious hill. Along the grassy clearings we 
ran our courses, and sat to talk among the sandpits 
and heathy brows, shut in from all but the warm 
blue and the sailing clouds. And so for two years 
the hills took on them their share of the spell, 
born of a passion restless, shy, infinitely sweet, 
with which my silent devotion to Barbara filled 
every place where she and I had been together ; 
but their true part in that conjunction I did not 
learn until Bab had said good-bye and gone away. 
Then, for two years more, as I looked day by day 
towards the old horizon, a gap in the ridge beyond 
the poplar clump showed me the way that she had 
gone, the way by which, I dreamed brave dreams, 
I should one day go to find her in the new world. 
It was early autumn when she left us, and in 
misting twilights all the levels below the hills were 
full of the smell of the mint-stilling ; to this day a 

228 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

thought of the smell comes back with the moist 
breathings of September dusk, and brings with it a 
motion of the boyish grief. Two years I watched 
the edge of my world, faithful utterly to Barbara 
in some dim western shire, with such help as was 
to be found in two or three little pencil-ruled 
letters before the final silence. In due time the 
barbed shaft was drawn out of the wound, not 
without throes. It was a strange strife when I 
first felt past all doubt the change working ; there 
were strong vows to bind the slipping faith, exe- 
crations of the baser self, sudden stealings-back of 
the old tenderness, desperately sad and dear, before 
that devotion wholly passed. It left its trace 
behind, and even now, in September evenings when 
the level mists thicken along the fields and the 
smell of dead leaves hangs about the walks, I find 
myself still looking away to far-off hills and think- 
ing of all that Barbara taught me first, by Allington 
Hills and Sandwell stream. 



229 



XXI 

October 14. 
As I crossed Hangman's Acre yesterday on my 
way to the Vachery, I wondered if I had ever seen 
a fouler day and a more desolate spot together. 
Hangman's Acre is a plot that may well have a 
curse on it — low-lying, waterlogged ground of so 
villanous heart that not even thistles will thrive 
there ; it was once sown with oats by a new tenant, 
and the four-inch straw still litters the stitches ; 
the stunted oaks, the Dead Man's tree amongst 
them, starve in the thin clay ; the hedges are run 
wild, and broken at the fancy of any strays. There 
are plenty of derelict fields in our region, but none 
to touch this miserable piece ; and I sometimes 
muse whether, in that Clearing House or Court of 
Transcendental Equity, which I hope to see one 
day at work, I could not claim damages for the 
perpetual depressing influence of all these acres of 
unutterably slack and slovenly farming amongst 
which I take my walks. The wilderness is one 
thing, the busy works of men another ; but this 
confusion of thwarted Nature with human failure 
is one of those things which shrivel the soul. In 

230 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

the middle of such thoughts as these there came the 
sound of a right-and-left somewhere down in the 
valley, answered instantly by the kok-kok of a 
pheasant close by in the copse, and I made a note 
— for the six hundredth time — of the quarter to 
which my claim for transcendental damages must 
be addressed. If the land were in poor case, the 
weather matched it. In a general way I pour 
healthy scorn on people who are afraid of country 
ways and country wet. The man who shies at a 
mile or two of muddy lane, whose dismayed mind 
yearns instinctively towards his wonted cab-rank 
when the pelting shower catches him in the open 
plough, is a mere " product of civilisation," and is 
all the better for an elemental wash. We, who 
have to trudge our two or three miles of streaming 
road to get a postal order or a bottle of physic, in 
black winter nights when we must feel for the 
hedge-bank as we go, with the north-easter gnaw- 
ing the windward ear and pinching our finger-tips 
in his vice, we know the inward heat, the long 
thoughts that clear and shape themselves while 
the body holds its mechanic pace along the solitary 
way. We would not change those silent tramps 
in the rain or the starry frosts for all the flare and 
sociable hubbub of Oxford Street itself. And 
then, what would April, what would the sweet of 
June be, if they were not honestly bought and paid 
for, earned and learned by the full reckoning of 
the winter wild ? 

231 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

So much for all honest bad weather ; but there 
is a sort that is vile beyond all treaty and the 
sanctions of human fibre, and in these latitudes 
largely due, as I think, to modern and artificial 
states of the sky. There is often in an unadul- 
terated north wind that which makes one under- 
stand at once why the Devil is said to sit in lateribus 
aquilonis ; but when a peculiar dun gloom, an 
olive-hued, throat-catching fume, a sting in the 
rain perhaps partly chemical, are added to the 
miserable hour, the soul of the toughest rustic cries 
out as against unfair play. There is war without 
truce between man and Nature — 

*' Pater ipse colendi 
Haud facilem esse viam voluit ..." 

grant that from the hardness of the world use 
extunds various arts, and that our wits are profit- 
ably sharpened by cares ; yet if there be a suspicion 
of added handicap, the transition from braced 
energy to listless depression is one of the shortest 
in life. All the Virgilian plagues, the blights and 
weeds and birds and weather, one can face with a 
stout courage ; but let a man begin to see behind 
the primordial contest the new odds of legislative 
interferences, municipal smoke-plagues, economic 
weed-plagues and ^ird-plagues, and it may go near 
to break his heart. Without this uncovenanted 
advantage, storms and seasons buffet us in vain. 
From the weather and the scene at their worst I 

232 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

was glad enough to get into the lee of the farm 
buildings at the Vachery. After the raw wind 
and the puddled furrows, the smell of the wood 
smoke blown gustily about the yard and the dry 
footing by the ricks lulled the temper with a 
luxurious sense of refuge. The daylight, a wan 
gloom at the best, had begun to thicken before I 
reached the farm ; and when I knocked, the house 
door was already barred for the night. After due 
parley, almost drowned in the uproar made by the 
dogs, I was admitted, and found the household 
settled in for the night, the men drawn round the 
kitchen fire while supper was making ready on the 
long table in the middle of the room. It was a 
patriarchal composition. Jethro Tully, the master, 
sat in the inmost place in the chimney-corner, his 
white beard and wrinkled face lit by the blazing 
stick fire ; next him his two sons, strong-faced, 
middle-aged men, grave and silent ; beyond them 
the carter-boy and a little sickly grandson of 
the house whispered and laughed together on the 
farthest bench. The elder son's wife, a spare, 
hard-featured woman with invincible eyes, and her 
niece, a slight, fair-haired girl, moved to and fro 
about the table in the flickering light. The two 
terriers and the sheep-dog, their dutiful alarum 
discharged, lay at length before the hearth, serenely 
forgetful of rabbit-burrow or miry fold. The wind 
rumbled in the chimney, and now and again sent 
a blue haze of wood smoke across the room, to 

233 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

mix with the fine hungry smell from the great 
black pot, whose lid chattered and steamed above 
the crackling bavin. The room, though bare of all 
but the first necessities, had a look of persuasive 
comfort. The shining slabs of the oak table, with 
its darned but well bleached cloth, the heavy 
benches, the single armchair, the tall clock, the 
gun slung over the chimney breast, the sheephook 
and old green umbrella behind the door made one 
reflect not quite contentedly on one's own ingenious 
superfluity. The brick floor, the capacious hearth, 
patient of muddy boots and paws, show one's 
Persian apparatus of carpets and hangings in a 
new light. The master of the house in his simple 
state is the true aristocrat, deriving his descent 
straight from a gentry far beyond our short-legged 
pedigrees ; and before his patriarchal throne by 
the hearth I — an unclassed Ulysses, wandering at 
a loose end for many a year among men and 
matters — behold in Mus' Tully not so much 
Eumaeus as Alcinous himself. 

I settled the small business I had come about ; 
and my account for sundry tackle from the woods, 
spray faggots, ether-boughs and thatching-rods 
was audited and receipted by the scholar of the 
house, little Alf the crippled grandson, the only 
one there, I think, who would face the business of 
writing his name. There was a little time left 
before supper was ready to set on, so I sat with 
my steaming boots on the hearthstone and led old 

234 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

Tully on to ancient history. As is generally the 
case, he needed very little leading. I sometimes 
compare his mind to one of our thick-standing 
woods, which will return an echo as clearly as a 
hillside or a house-wall. My due remark about 
the roughness of the weather brought an answer 
at once from his close-set memories. There had 
not been such a wet winter since 'fifty-one ; but 
that was worse, a good bit. There was hardly 
any corn sown right through till the spring. He 
was at Hoadly Hill then, and there they always 
reckoned to get their corn in by Old Michaelmas ; 
and they managed to, somehow ; and after that, 
when 'twas so wet, they kept on saying "Where 
should we 'a been ? . . ." Terrible wet it was, day 
after day ; they was wet through all day, some- 
times, and no fire to dry themselves by ; took 
their things off wet at night, and put 'em on wet 
again in the morning. No, he doesn't reckon it 
hurt them. I look across at the old man in the 
firelight and grant — by all our country standards 
of well-favouredness — that he does not seem the 
worse for all that hardness. Something of the 
lean face, the angular bent figure is perhaps due 
to such experiences ; something too, I think, of a 
look of refinement, a filing-out of grosser elements 
and an expression almost spiritual, far too rare 
among the present race. 

Well, Tully is saying, other people of course 
they got their corn in late — all anyhow, most of it ; 

235 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

and it was rough right through the summer. That 
made the price go up ; that and the Crimean War 
afterwards. Terrible poor stuff, most of the flour 
was that year, and wouldn't bake ; sometimes they'd 
have to take it out of the oven with a spoon, and 
sometimes it'd spew right out of the loaf, like. 
Wheat was up to twenty-eight pounds a load in 
the war ; old Mus' Luxford, up at Nymans, he'd 
kept his back to make more, and it come down to 
fourteen pounds in one week. No, there was no 
bad times, not hereabouts, as far as he could recol- 
lect; things seemed to go on pretty much the 
same as usual. He reckoned the men on the 
farms weren't no worse off than what they were 
now. You see, *twas better farming then. He 
goes on to enlarge, in a way I well know, on the 
sins of the modern farmer : the uncleaned dicks, 
the wet hungry land, the weeds. ... It was better, 
time back ; but 'twas never very grand round about 
here. No good land to be seen, they used to say, 
from Grinstead steeple. 

I told him I had been at Southover not long 
before, and had seen the bullock-team going to 
work, one of the few remaining in Sussex. He 
remembered when they'd bullocks all about here 
— at Burstye and Nymans and High House ; some 
were Sussex and some black Welsh. The bullocks 
at Hoadly Hill wasn't shoed ; they was never on 
the roads. He'd seen them shoe the Welsh at 
Grinstead Fair ; held 'em down with a prong over 

236 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

their necks — a funny job that was, too. They'd 
two bulls at High House then : tremendous strong, 
they was ; if a waggon stuck anywhere, and four 
horses couldn't shift it, they'd put they bulls in, 
and they'd fetch it out as easy! Why was they 
given up ? Well, some people said it was the 
cattle-plague ; but there ! — they'd sim'd to make 
up their minds to have done with 'em, 'fore that 
come, though they couldn't rightly say why. The 
bullocks was better'n horses, some ways ; they 
didn't snatch at their work, and they didn't make 
such a mess of the ground with their hoofs when 
*twas wet and bungey. Why didn't he have a 
team himself now, ay ? He only shakes his head 
at the question : there are difficulties, of course ; 
the stoutest of us owes a sort of allegiance — at 
some certain interval — to the spirit of the age. 

One of the best qualities, as I think, in Tully's 
histories is the way in which they grow out of 
each other ; a single name or a date sets him off 
on a fresh line of reminiscence ; but this tangential 
habit needs at times to be held in check, or the 
listener might never reach the end of any given 
legend ; and it is sometimes well to be provided 
with a decent pretext for breaking off the intermin- 
able series. It is enough that the year of the 
disappearance of the last yoke of bullocks from 
Hoadly Hill happened to be the first of the 
ministrations of Parson Short in Sheringham 
parish ; we are at once in the middle of an account 

237 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

of the state of things which that notable reformer 
found awaiting him in the early 'forties. I hear of 
the manor pound, and the stocks, and of one 
Andrews a sweep, who was the last man to be 
put in them ; of the Petty Constables, chosen for a 
year, of their insignia of staff and handcuffs ; of 
old Finch the shoemaker, who held office when 
the village was full of navvies working on the new 
railway ; how there were fights behind the church 
on Sunday mornings ; " and we boys, we'd slip out 
as soon as we heard 'em at it ; and old Finch he'd 
come to them when they was sitting on their 
seconds' knee — an old man, he was, and he knew 
if he was rough on 'em he'd like as not get a black 
eye himself — and he used to wear big round glasses, 
and he shoves them up on his forehead, and he says, 

* Well, my men, when you've had enough,* he says, 

* we'd be very glad for you to leave off ; ' and some- 
times they'd stop, and sometimes they wouldn't. 
The navvies they was always fighting; and that 
set others on fighting too, and a deal of wickedness. 
Well, when Mr. Short come, he soon stopped all 
that on Sundays. You see, old Mr. Budd as was 
before him, he'd let things go pretty much as they 
liked, and he was often away in London or Brigh- 
ton, and nobody to take the services. I've known 
a body lie a day~two in the church, 'cause there 
was no one to bury it. Well, Mr. Short, he 
reckoned to make alterations ; and he had the 
church cleaned right out, the dirt and the bats and 

238 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

the owls and all ; then he started the schoolin* ; 
got a master and mistress to teach us ; up in the 
long room at the Dolphin, that was. The only 
school I rec'lect before that was up in the strong- 
room over the church porch, and that wouldn't 
hold more'n a dozen or so. And, you see, it 
wasn't as if he was getting money out of the 
living ; not above twenty pounds he didn't ; the 
great tithes all belonged to old Mr. Tree ; they'd 
been in his fam'ly ever so long, and he was in the 
Queen's Bench, and he used to come down to the 
place sometimes in the summer, and lived in the 
old parsonage, what they calls Sheringham Court 
now ; two or three weeks he'd be there, and always 
an officer with him, and then he'd go back to the 
Bench again. Wonderful what Mr. Short done 
for the village, while he was here ; and if it hadn't 
been that there was one or two against him, that 
had no call to be, he'd have made it a different 
place altogether. Who was that? Why, the 
people that was at the Park then — always a bad 
fam'ly they was. They was agin* him from the 
first. And Parson Short he spoke to 'em straight 
about it all ; and so they was agin' him all along ; 
and it seemed as how they was too strong for him, 
and at last he had to go. It was but a little while 
after he was gone that the old gentleman died in 
his chair at dinner. I rec'lect the funeral ) I never 
see the church so full, but not an eye that wasn't 
dry in it. I went down into the vault while it was 

239 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

open ; there was four or five coffins there, with 
coats of arms on *em. There was none on his ; 
more like a parish funeral, it was. When the Park 
was sold, all the place went and had a look at it : 
you see, they'd been regular afraid of the house 
while the old man was there — * Little Hell ' they 
called it ; and the people went looking into all the 
rooms, some of 'em half frightened, and some making 
fun of it, and saying they saw a black man behind 
the door, and such-like. Seemed as if everybody 
was glad to think that party was gone for good 
and all at last.'* 

The pot-lid had been clacking to an unmistake- 
able tune for some time, and the comings and 
goings of Mrs. William betrayed anxiety about 
the dishing-up : so when there was a great boil 
over, and rushings and outcry of the women, I 
seized the chance of the interruption to old Tully's 
chronicle, and took my leave. The night looked 
black and struck rawly after the glow of the 
kitchen ; and it was a dreary three miles home, 
with a restless wind roaming the desolate fields 
like a presence, sounding far or near in a planta- 
tion or high-timbered hedge, going by in a chilly 
gust and leaving a dead pause. There was a 
narrow rift of greenish sky in the west, and now 
and then Venus glittered out through the folds of 
cloud, to shine in the pools of the drenched cart- 
track, and more than once so to save me a deeper 
plunge. I thought, as I went, of Tully's histories, 

240 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

and tried to shape out something of the life of the 
parish sixty years ago, a scene of ruder energies 
and, I think, larger liberties than ours, a rougher, 
heartier plan of living, a stronger-lined picturesque 
of character, a much greater width of extremes. 
No sign here, at least, of the hard times, the 
tyranny and subservience which make such a 
figure in Cobbett's " Rural Rides," and as certainly 
nothing of the buttercup-and-daisy idylls of Miss 
Mitford's "Village." I believe, for my part, that 
Tully and his kind — for he is only a fine example 
of a considerable school — are in the true mean 
between the pitchy chiaroscuro of the one style 
and the coloured-crayon touches of the other, 
painters of " the real Picture of the Poor," of the 
truth of country life as our grandfathers knew it. 
Ruminating such comparisons as these, I found 
myself at the field gate sooner than I had ex- 
pected ; and when I came into the still warmth 
of the study, lit by the hollow-fallen fire, my eye 
fell on a certain eight volumes on a middle shelf, 
and I told myself once more that Crabbe was the 
man ; that, after all, there was never any one in 
the world yet like him for the presentment — per- 
fectly, or dreadfully balanced, as you will — of the 
rustic soul. 



241 R 



XXII 

December 12. 
Coming home from the village on black winter 
nights I can so far sympathise with the ordinary 
townsman's dread of country solitude as to con- 
ceive of possible grounds for his delusion. When 
one turns out of the snug room at the Lodge or 
The Laurels, passes the shop-windows shining on 
the drenched pavements and takes the muddy road 
for home, one has an inkling of the sensations of 
those larger children who dread loneliness and the 
dark. At the turning where the companionable 
noises of the village are left behind, and where on 
moonless nights the light of the outmost oil-lamp 
fades on the shadowy hedges, I can imagine the 
dismay of certain people who are not good com- 
pany for themselves, if they had to walk into that 
wall of impenetrable darkness, and fare forth 
solitary towards the silent house waiting them at 
the end of two miles of uphill and wicked way. 
I can conceive of the fact ; but the wonder of it 
grows on me every time I make the journey. The 
mere fitting of one's self into one's own angle ; the 
taking possession of one's undivided monarchy ; 

242 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

the yawning welcome of Nym who knew his 
master's step at the gate far too well to bark ; the 
clink of Lucy's oven-door or hiss of pan ; what 
load of naughty pride or frost of custom can make 
a man slight the greeting of such things as these ? 
Who rather would not find that the difficulty lay 
in being — 

"Not too elate 
With self-sufficing solitude"? 

I read lately amongst those strange documents 
of the human mind the correspondence columns of 
certain Church newspapers, the plaint of a man 
who professed a nightly horror at the thought that 
when he had shut the door of his country parson- 
age at 8 p.m., no one would knock at it till the 
postman came next morning. To my cast of 
vision that seems absolutely the position of a lost 
soul. Heaven help him ! Was there nothing 
available to replace the birdseye and the clerical 
shop of his colleague on his way home from the 
Institute, the politics and sociology of his cheese- 
monger churchwarden? Was he afraid of his 
dreams? Did he know nothing of burrowing 
back shut-eyed into one's memory and living with 
mighty pleasant company, minds and faces worth 
ten thousand of the tangible people he wants to 
sit with him to scare away the bogey of vacancy ? 
Didn't he — putting on one side the translations 
of the Fathers, and the Pastor in Parochia, the 

243 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

Preacher's Promptuary, the Liddon or Farrar of 
his allegiance, and of course the correspondence 
columns of his Church newspaper — didn't he read? 
Or did he belong to a library, and consume his 
novel-of-the-week, his light and heavy magazines, 
his epoch-making science, all to fend off the horror 
of having nothing to do but think, stuffing the 
aching void with the first mast or stubble that 
came to his hand, using all that printed paper as 
so much tobacco-leaf, burnt to steady the nerves, 
to woo sleep ? Anyway, he never knew the 
meaning of a book. They are not books, in the 
finer sense, which come into the house in parcels, 
chaotically incompatible, and after a week or two 
depart without regret, a little looser in the binding, 
a little more thumb-smudged ; their matter sucked 
dry and thrown away, the orange-peel of literature. 
Books are property, in the accurate sense of the 
word, personal belongings with their own standing 
and habitation on familiar shelves, to be found 
without fumbling in the dark ; they have outward 
characters of their own as well as inward, idiosyn- 
crasies of form and bindings ; they have been in 
your service, the greater part of them, thirty years, 
let us say, and they will stay on your shelves as 
long as you can need them, and a little longer. 
In their matter, they reflect your taste and lean- 
ings by their range and their limits ; they are all 
sealed to you by your bold or whimsical autograph, 
by the pencil ticks which mark a beauty in your 

244 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

particular genre, a handsome seconding of some 
favourite heresy of your own, by the annotations 
and parallel places which link them to their fellows 
above and below. These I call books, the tried 
friends whose leather coats begin to show a sympa- 
thetic crack or two as your own case wears a little 
the worse for the turning over of the world, whose 
matter has gone to make part of your inward con- 
texture ever since you began to go to school. 

Of this sort are the rows of brown backs, with 
here and there a chance vanity of second-hand 
vellum or new livery of buckram, neat but not gaudy, 
whose gilding catches a glint from the low fallen 
fire when I come into the warm lull of my burrow 
from frozen journeys ; such the good company 
which puts out of mind the binding frost upon 
the garden or the winter storm sweeping across 
the lonely fields, and has power to fill most of the 
corners of the empty house. I keep no unmanage- 
able rout, needing step-ladders or catalogues. My 
odd hundreds have multiplied by the relaxed 
standards of age beyond the rigid limit of an 
earlier choice ; but perhaps for some little time 
past have approached their full number. I have 
nearly all the old books ; and the new ones grow 
ever less indispensable, more and more obnoxious 
to the wise man's objection, **ils nous empechent 
de lire les anciens." And by the old books I 
mean the real ancients, the first fathers of the rest, 
the backs in Leyden calf or Venetian vellum, 

245 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

which seem to inspire in most visitors to my 
shelves either a puzzled shyness or an almost 
personal animosity. I sometimes make a guess, 
while I warp one of the brown folios over the log- 
fire on a winter night, how many others in this 
most leisured county may be busy with an author 
of that standing : fifty, I make it, when I am in 
a sociable mood ; when the pride of singularity 
swells, I doubt of five. In either frame of mind, I 
am happy in thinking how absolutely right is the 
choice of the real classics. It is, after all, well to 
begin at the beginning and know something of the 
hard-wrought alphabet which all our later exercises 
lazily shift and combine, perhaps with a consistently 
decreasing power of seeing the symbols in their 
true scope and force. And then, what a security 
and an economy of energy in using the result of 
Time's sieve ! There are few things in life which 
so affect me with a comfortable wonder as the 
absolute fixity, beyond any sort of appeal, of the 
court of ultimate judgment in literature ; the con- 
version of the weathercock opinion of contemporary 
criticism, right by chance and wrong by instinct, 
into the immovable security of the full orb of time, 
is a cheerful miracle which might keep even a 
weekly reviewer from despair. To my mind, there 
is a natural barrier between us and the books of 
our own age ; coeval literature is flesh of our flesh, 
and it needs a generation or two to intervene and 
attenuate the affinity in order to sanction the 

246 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

commerce. There are, of course, very obvious 
rejoinders to be made to this position, rejoinders 
invincible for those who translate the world into 
their unhesitating terms of white and black, and 
solicitous enough for those who seek the necessary- 
half-tone among the infinite greys. By this re- 
striction a man lessens his chance of that purest 
glory, the hailing of a rising genius under the 
neglect or the hooting of the crowd ; of finding 
the enthusiastic shilling which he gave for a paper- 
covered set of undergraduate verses growing, after 
twenty years' burial, into profuse guineas in a dis- 
cerning world ; and he is, of course, open to the 
charge of bondage to dead minds and the unfruit- 
ful past. People like Mrs. Sims-Bigg, for instance, 
prefer to choose for themselves : Mudie's list and 
a pencil and their own will free as air, unfettered 
by musty rules of dead old Greeks and Romans or 
anybody else, thank you ! Yet, my dear Madam, 
are you, after all, wholly unchained ? I seem to 
recognise an almost nervous watching of the 
literary modes, somewhat after the pattern of the 
lynx-eyed solicitude to which you chiefly owe 
your fame in your hats ; you want to know what 
other people are reading ; you make a note of 
what the Duchess told the Under-Secretary to be 
sure to get ; you prick your ears at the pealing 
brass of the literary advertisements. If neither of 
us is to be trusted to forage at first hand for him- 
self, I would much rather, at my ease in a cool 

247 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

cave, sip a vintage sealed down two thousand 
years ago than try ardent spirits six months in 
bottle ; I will carve for myself from my ice-pre- 
served mammoth rather than take a tepid modicum 
of meat chewed for me Eskimo-fashion by my 
neighbours at the feast. Each must answer for 
himself: to me the safer part seems to be not to 
try to help Time with the momentary sling of his 
winnowing-shovel, but to be content to grub in the 
heap of corn that lies at his feet, secure from all 
the winds of heaven. Therefore my book-case 
contains as a basis, in all sorts of editions, from 
the safe comment of Gronovius to the jaunty 
graces of Gildersleeve, the Greeks and Latins 
pretty complete. I read through them at a steady 
plod, and when I reach the gate of horn in my 
several journeys, I presently turn about and begin 
again : and on the whole I get more pleasure from 
the dead languages — spite of the drag of an in- 
veterate hobble in construing — than from any 
other sort of reading. This judgment, though it 
amuses some of my acquaintance and seems to 
irritate others in a surprising manner, is deliberate 
and mature. There are those who are instinctive 
classics at seven, and remain prize schoolboys at 
seventy ; it is another matter to scrape through a 
casual Pass under protest, and after certain experi- 
mental excursions to settle down, unbothered by 
accents and led by no specious lure of philology to 
make the classics the main indoor business of one's 

248 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

days. That the Greeks and Latins wrote amaz- 
ingly better than many modern novelists, and are 
a great deal more amusing than most plays ; that 
there may be more downright human interest and 
colour in a historian two thousand years dead than 
in yesterday's "word-painting" by special corre- 
spondents, and more practicable politics in Plato 
than in last night's debate : these claims one 
deprecatingly advances from time to time to one's 
more indulgent friends, and retires before their 
smiles to the safe covert of singularity whereto no 
one offers to follow. 

Beginning at this foundation I build forward the 
courses of my shelves pretty closely with the classics 
in the larger significance of the word ; in the lower 
tiers there are not many gaps ; but the nearer the 
orders approach to the profusion of our own time, 
the oftener comes the unexpected hiatus and the 
more freely I take leave to dispense immortality 
on my own terms. At the near edge of the past, 
where the great judgment is — spite of a deal of 
current assertion — not yet finally confirmed, I 
indulge some very decided aversions. There is 
less presumption in the position than might be 
imagined : there can always be found some weighty 
champion of one's dearest heresy, and one's offence 
need rarely be anything more than the ranging of 
one's self under one or other of two standards. If 
I fail to prize a robustious poet whose rhymes 
appear to me to fulfil the office of the pinches of 

249 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

gunpowder at the elbows of a cracker, and whose 
general philosophy impresses me as a sort of view- 
halloo of the Unseen, I join myself to another 
bard who seems at least to own the Virgilian trick 
of making his lines sing. The boundless capacity 
of taste possessed by some people is a thing I 
always admire ; there is not a product of the age 
like our strenuous Mr. Dempster but can swallow 
absolute incompatibles together ; whether he pos- 
sesses a palate, I cannot say ; but his impartial 
maw concocts at once — thanks chiefly, I think, to 
" University Extension " — Mill and Ruskin, Shelley 
and Herbert Spencer, Thackeray and " the greatest 
living master of romance," without an apparent 
qualm. 

Catholic tastes like Dempster's would find the 
gaps among my moderns too large to be forgiven. 
I take my stand on a principle something like 
Montaigne's "I'idee de ces riches ames du temps 
pass6 me degouste de I'autruy et de moy-mesme." 
I am definitely for the ancients ; I am too lazy to 
do my own sifting; I will have my Bavius, my 
Trissotin, my Blackmore and Tickell already ruled 
out for me by the unerring pen ; I will not be 
troubled to identify their inevitable antitypes 
among the swarming immortals of our own hour. 
After all, though the gaps be wide, I have been 
forced to admit not a few of the veriest moderns. 
I like to think that I see in them authentic touches 
of the true descent ; yet I would not insist upon 

250 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

their immortality on the strength of a predilection 
of my own ; I would rather allow the chance of 
my forecasts being wrong, as a set-off to my 
impregnable judgment of the past. 

The winnowing of Time, though it irrefragably 
keeps the true corn and sends the chaff down the 
wind to oblivion, yet sorts the grain into several 
parcels ; and among the secondary men there 
are some who seem to be in a manner cheated 
with a somewhat unsubstantial honour, the mere 
fame of fame. The difficulty of being generous 
to the absolutely great and at the same time 
just to the second order is enormous, perhaps 
insuperable, and founded on dimensions beyond 
our scope. For instance, it does not do to think 
of Virgil and Lucan together. Lean a little to- 
wards the lesser man, and it is quite possible to 
find his force make the -^neid seem more than 
a little shadowy and diffuse. Grant to the full 
Joubert's objection that force is not energy ; that 
there are authors who have " plus de muscles que 
de talent ; *' that force is a quality " qui n'est louable 
que lorsqu'elle est ou cachee ou vetue. Dans le 
sens vulgaire Lucain en eut plus que Platon ; " 
yet something sticks in the mind and avenges the 
lower genius — the recollection, perhaps of moods 
when .with Montaigne we preferred Lucan's ''subti- 
litd aigue et relevde " to Virgil's " force meure et 
constante." In our justice we are necessarily 
ungenerous. Even without bearing in mind that 

251 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

Lucan died at twenty-six, a balanced critic will 
judge that here the sum of praise is not a thing 
that can be divided ; the greater poet must have 
it all or none ; we have, so to say, to give the 
lesser his meed while the other looks away. The 
difficulty will afford a nice exercise for critics who 
are untroubled by doubts as to the relation of the 
part to the whole. 

The lower room among the immortals has its 
own compensations — a proportionate safety from 
the dull ass's hoof, from the annotating critic, from 
*' University Extension," and such summer fly- 
blows. I sometimes imagine a calm corner of 
the Elysian fields where walk the subordinate 
immortals, masters in their own realm. There, 
I fancy, are to be found Xenophon, Lucan, 
Lucian, Catullus, Seneca, Butler, Berkeley, La 
Bruyere, Donne, Gray, Crabbe, Hood — a mixed 
multitude, an election to outrage the seemly 
sober critic, only defensible by the plea of a per- 
sonal warp of humour. To this warp I would 
allow a much larger room in the choice of books 
than it usually receives. General taste in read- 
ing is a phantasmal thing ; to have any profit 
there must be the personal liking or disliking, 
a nexus where the author may catch hold ; 
•'aliquid inter te intersit et librum." The im- 
personal relation in which many people stand 
towards their books seems to me to imply a tragic 
waste of human effort. Unless a man has his 

252 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

personal friends and his enemies among his 
authors, instinctively chosen by likeness or differ- 
ence of humour, by contrary virtue or friendly 
vice, by south sides or shady corners, by idio- 
syncrasy of sweet or sour, all his application is a 
dreary futility, mere waste of spelling-books at 
school. Naturally this intimacy is more easily 
admitted by the secondary men : and perhaps 
we are, after all, apt to be rather too easily 
familiar with the thrones and dominions ; it may 
be better on the whole for a tenth-rate mind to 
accost Shakespeare with less cheerful assurance 
and to find his account with, let us say, Sterne or 
Sheridan. The heroes of the Elysian suburb all 
offer, to my thinking, some peculiar handle of 
approach and converse, and are, I think, sub- 
stitutes, sufficient on the whole, for the sociable 
pipe and the friend who "drops in," perhaps 
even for the company of some customary house- 
hold gods. I say nothing here of the absolute 
great, whose very names sound their own pre- 
paratories of solemn music, who require some 
offering of grave leisure and the purged ear. 
For hours that are without question common, a 
man will do well to keep a shelf or two of the 
minor immortals. 

I say " keep " : yet the other night when I took 
down a little crook-backed Menander and saw on 
the title-page above my own hand the brown 
inscriptions; "Judocus Bol Lugd. Bat, 1652," and 

253 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

"Joshua Mercer, S.T.P. His Book, 1778," there 
came to mind the truth that instead of our owning 
them, it is we who are the temporary pensioners 
of our books. The buyer of new editions and 
virgin bindings obscures this truth from himself: 
it is the old broken calf, the dog's-eared scribbled 
pages which tell us that we are perhaps but the 
twentieth guest at that table. Who was Joshua 
Mercer, I wonder, who tried little pieces of metrical 
Psalm-version between the scraps of Menander, 
and announced with a nobly confident quill that 
this was His Book ? Can it be mine, too, I muse ? 
Even in the present we begin to lose our pre- 
carious seisin : as a man nears fifty, he comes to 
know that he has read such and such a book for 
the last time ; others, both high and low, we shall 
re-read perhaps to the last, but we have said good- 
bye in the world of script, according to our turns 
and humours, to Longinus, let us say, to " Clarissa," 
to Froissart, to La Rochefoucauld, to "Red- 
gauntlet," to Borrow, to Hosea Biglow, to Charles 
Kingsley — to afford a hotch-potch wherein most 
tastes may perhaps find something to their account. 
It is well to bear this in mind, and to think some- 
times of the reflux of the tide which has thrown 
together here on the little shelf these spoils out of 
the riches of the great sea. In the snug firelit room 
on winter nights, when the grace or laughter of 
the old text speaks in one's ear almost with human 
intonation, it is good once in a way to remember 

254 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

the dust which gathers for a little time on the 
unopened pages in the quiet empty house, until 
the "dispersion of a gentleman's library" breaks 
up the treasure and scatters the old and the new 
to other shores. 



255 



XXIII 

January 20. 
The troop of children that has trailed slowly 
home from school, dropping detachments at 
cottage gates and field stiles, finally scatters at 
a corner where a finger-post offers the handsome 
choice of direction, To London ; To Trucker's Hatch. 
The main body, in charge of a biggish girl, 
disappears among a group of estate cottages on 
the highroad ; a little company of three strikes 
up the narrow turning, and begins the last stage 
of the seven miles a day to school and home 
again. The lane is a rough one, and any one who 
has stood in some wintry twilight to watch the 
little regiment defile down the hollow between 
high bramble-grown banks till the last of the 
stragglers are swallowed up in the misty gloom 
of a vague tree-hung bottom, may perhaps be set 
on thinking about the two ends of that muddy 
or dusty trudge, the long march and counter- 
march day by day for some eight or nine mortal 
years ; and wondering what sort of provision 
awaits the travellers at home, and also in that 
other headquarters for whose requirements the 

256 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

whole mighty manoeuvre is at work. If the 
explorer take the turning to Trucker's Hatch, he 
will find that the lane soon becomes a green 
track, and widens out into a long strip of ragged 
common, a few acres of pasturage struggling with 
gorse and fern ; a little farther on he will come 
to two or three fenced fields, a black-timbered 
thatched cottage leaning perilously over its potato- 
patch, and a tumble-down little farmstead — a 
squat brick dwelling-house, an iron cart-shed, one 
hayrick, a desolation of disused fowl-houses and 
empty styes. This, common and houses together, 
is Trucker's Hatch, with a population of nine 
souls. Its school contingent is now but three 
small girls ; it is three years since Willy Avery 
from the farm and Joe Mace from the cottage 
passed out of their Standards together, and there 
are no lads at present at the Hatch to take their 
places. Willy, best of boys, a model for attendance 
and attention, devoured the learning fed to him 
with the methodic regularity of a chaff-cutter ; he 
won a scholarship and was sent to the grammar 
school in the county town, and finally fitted him- 
self for a clerkship in a suburban bank. Joe, 
tormented with vast labour into a semblance of 
reading and writing, is at length delivered by the 
age-limit from the unwilling hands of authority, 
and in a few months of blessed holiday forgets all 
the lessons of his bondage. He forgets the fright- 
ful presence of the sums which he used to chatter 

257 S 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

in his sleep, the frantically conned page which 
flickered before his eyes ; he does not as yet forget 
the impression of eight years' assiduous contempt 
from the master, as for a sort of changeling in the 
educational household, a creature of a lower order, 
made the derision of the class and the especial foil 
of his mate the conquering Willy. Even when the 
thing called Nature-Study impressed itself on the 
great motive intelligences of the sphere, and in 
due season came down to the regions of Trucker's 
Hatch, Joe did not get the chance that seemed to 
be thrown in his way ; he, the silent stalker of 
hedge-row mysteries, cunning in traps and snares, 
learned in nests and eggs and wild flowers, got no 
hearing at all from Mr. Dempster, enthusiastic in 
the new subject, getting up the position of the pole- 
star from a textbook, and after a half-holiday's 
field expedition sending a brace of cockchafers 
to the Warden for identification. Joe's hand, 
which went up in a quite unwonted way when the 
new lessons began, soon learned to keep its place ; 
and the study of Nature is inculcated without any 
difference to distinguish it from the rest of the 
time-table. But all is done at last, and Joe is free 
to live the life which, for as long as he can 
remember, has been put before him as little better 
than a beast's. The beasts that he knows are 
always friendly, at least ; the big, mannerly, 
sensible, honest farm-horses are far better com- 
pany than the tyrant and his myrmidons the 

258 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

pupil-teachers. Joe would like most of all things 
to be a carter-boy, and have horses to look after, 
and learn to plough like his father. But as no one 
seems to want a carter-boy, he is put to minding 
the stock on the common, half a dozen poor cows 
and a pony belonging to the farm. He idles the 
day long about the gorse clumps and beds of 
bracken, often alone from daylight to dark ; he 
talks to Duchess or Soldier for company, cuts 
patterns on hazel-sticks or plaits rushes, and fills 
his hat with blackberries or nuts ; the events of 
his life are the coming of the Wednesday grocer's 
cart, the chasing of his charge out of a neighbour- 
ing mangold field, and the stopping of the ever- 
fresh gaps in the neglected hedge. This repair he 
does to the utmost of his skill and materials, with 
a sort of make-believe of man's work, driving his 
stakes and wattling in the boughs with a touch of 
ancestral skill. A week's downpour under the 
shelter of an old sack sets him on building for 
himself a little bower framed of hazel-rods, the 
walls stuffed with fern, and the roof of grass and 
rushes. He fashions a door to open on withy 
hinges, and windows wherefrom to observe his 
herds, and here he sits through dripping days, 
making his toys or playing on an elder whistle 
airs rude enough for Tityrus, till the gathering 
dark tells him it is near the end of his day, and he 
may call the cows together and drive them home. 
He rarely takes the old road down to the village ; 

259 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

sometimes he is sent to do the Saturday marketing 
and finds old school-mates serving behind the 
counter of the general shop, or sauntering up from 
the cricket field. At the general assembly of the 
yearly Fair he meets others of his own time, 
entered on various careers — one in the gardens at 
the Park, one in a training-stable, others on leave 
from the regiment or the ship. He envies none of 
these their lot ; there is only one with whom he 
would care to change places, George Prevett, the 
cowman's lad at Frogswell, who had the same 
desires as Joe, but has had his wish. George leads 
the plough team, and goes to market with the 
bullocks ; he does hedging in real earnest, with a 
billhook and hedger's gloves of his own ; he helps 
the thatcher on the ricks, and goes out, whistling 
in solitary importance, with the old mare in the 
cart to carry clover for the stock. He looks down, 
it is to be feared, on the hapless cow-tender, and 
the sting of his superiority goes home. 

Sometimes on Saturday evenings of summer 
weather there comes across the common a traveller 
oddly out of keeping with the scene, whose black 
coat and town boots have fared ill in the five miles 
of dust between the railway and the Hatch. Willy 
Avery, coming down to spend a Sunday with the 
old people at the farm, nods and gives the familiar 
"How's self?'* as he passes the ragged figure 
perched on the accustomed gate, or stretched at 
length beneath the shade of the gorse-bushes. At 

260 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

such moments of obvious comparison, how does 
each view the other's destiny ? What does the 
bank clerk at a pound a week think of the cow- 
minder, counting slow hour after hour in all 
weathers about the lonely common for his bare 
keep ; and what does the creature of boundless 
leisure in sun and wind say to the slave of rigid 
rules, shut in at eternal sums till the level sun 
strikes in over the wire blind, and dismisses him 
to the streets and his stifling attic? Willy reads 
his newspaper, and perhaps by this time has 
gathered that there is among thinking people a 
reactionary tendency to consider him and his kind 
not so purely the salt of the earth as Mr. Dempster 
in school gave him to understand that they were. 
Joe Mace reads nothing — not even the literature 
which lies at hand, the scraps of the county journal 
which the grocer's cart drops, and the wind dis- 
perses about the gorse on the common — and with 
no one to tell him of wonders, he may spend his 
whole life after the present idyllic fashion, and 
never know that any one has doubted the perfect- 
ness of the method of reward and discouragement 
under which he was reared. It will be an ironic 
turn of fortune, not without precedent, perhaps, if 
Willy should feel the set of opinion and, conscious 
of round shoulders and pale blood, learn the easy 
catchword about the land ; while Joe, tough- 
framed, tanned and bleached by sun and weather, 
idles about the waste acres, never to put his hand 

261 



LONEVVOOD CORNER 

to the desired carter's whip, nor to have a bill- 
hook and hedger's mittens of his own. For him 
there will be no new fancies about the significance 
of the symbol where the lane's end joins the high- 
road : To London ; To Trucker s Hatch, 

The last time I was at the Hatch and had a 
talk with Joe Mace, I left him at the door of his 
wigwam, busy with a sundial which he was 
fashioning out of a bit of slate and a hazel wand, 
to tell him, within an hour or so, when it was 
dinner-time. I came home the long round, by 
Nymans and the Park gates, nursing a simmering 
grudge against Dempster and his ways ; and when 
I reached the Green, I found mine enemy talking 
over his garden fence with the Warden. The 
Doctor came on with me, and the schoolmaster 
went back through his weedy and neglected 
garden-patch to his fireside, his pipe, and his book 
again. At the turn of the road I looked back and 
made a summary note of the phrontisterion in its 
elements : there stood the gaunt building, part 
old cement and part raw red brick, built at the 
lowest tender, its skimped utility joined with a 
curious waste of semi-ecclesiastical ornament ; there 
was the miry, dank playground, the perky school- 
house with its slatternly blinds and neglected 
garden ; and in a stuffy room my fancy saw the 
long, ungainly figure of the master, his narrow 
face bent over his book with the frown of strenuous 
assimilation. He was reading, the Warden told 

262 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

me, a new monograph on Education and the Rural 
Mind, improving himself, as he never ceases to 
do, and removing himself one more step from the 
barbarous void of yesterday. He had shown the 
Warden the book, and had flourished a little upon 
the new horizon opening before the benighted 
dwellers in the fields ; there was something about 
the *' nobilaty of laibour," says the Warden (drop- 
ping into a peculiarly horrible inflection which, 
for an alien, he has caught pretty nearly), and 
about " interestin' the children in the loife of the 
fields and the 'edges." Excellent, said the Warden : 
he supposed they might teach the boys to plough, 
for instance ? " Nhaow," replies Dempster, swell- 
ing with the pleasure of imparting a fundamental 
truth. " Nhaow ; but we shall teach them to 
mdik pleaows ! " ** I didn't ask who was to use 
them," said the Warden ; " he'd got as much as 
his head could carry for one day. What do you 
think of his idea of taking classes over one of the 
farms, and giving them object-lessons ? " 

I told him what I thought of the several 
elements of the scheme : Dempster's qualifications 
for the job, who was born in Hackney, whose soul 
still inhabits the Seven Sisters' Road : the boys, 
many of whom have lived on farms all their lives, 
and have a finger-end knowledge of the things 
which Dempster guesses at out of books : and old 
Tully or Mrs. Ventom as a likely third factor in 
the proposed invasion of growing crops and hedges. 

263 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

Yes, the Warden had thought of that side of it. 
On the whole, he fancies we are somehow not 
getting full value for our money and trouble in 
the schools. Is Dempster a particularly bad 
specimen, did I think ? I told him I had known 
others not much better equipped for their trade. 
There are, of course, worthy and amenable souls 
here and there, chiefly, in my experience, to be 
found in the smaller schools and lower classes ; 
but in general there seems to be a common stamp 
of a remarkably well-defined capacity and interest ; 
a summary, coarse-fingered dealing with children's 
minds ; a consuming zeal for " Progress " ; and an 
unresting self-assertion, a prickly jealousy for the 
status and profit of the profession. Dempster was 
once discovered weeping, heart-broken under a 
tree at a school-treat, because his wife had not 
been asked to tea on the Vicarage lawn, but had 
been left with the village mothers in the tent. He 
loses no chance of arranging a date or writing a 
letter on his own motion. He thinks London is 
the world, and is never tired of telling the children, 
with jeering comparisons, that they are a back- 
ward and benighted race. He wreaks against 
antiquity a spite which ^almost seems personal; 
all that is old and peaceable and slow is held up as 
anachronous — a crime against the new order, before 
long, one infers, to be fitted with proper penalties. 
On the whole, I don't think we are getting a 
good return for our expenditure on the schools. 

264 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

Of course, the Warden says, we haven't made 
the least attempt to get the right sort of men for 
the work. "Cest Teffet d'une haute ame et bien 
forte, de savoir condescendre a ces allures pueriles 
et les guider," he quotes. By the way, he hears 
that in France they have quite taken up Montaigne 
lately as an authority on education. He wonders 
whether we shall ever find in England really able 
men going into elementary school-teaching as 
people go into mission and slum work, and that 
sort of thing ? But about Dempster and his kind : 
if we could get people to look at results for a 
minute, and leave principles alone for a bit, 
wouldn't there be some evidence as to the working 
of the plan? Of course, it's safe to fly straight 
in the face of any modern general proposition : 
the common party-opposition always goes for 
cavilling details ; no one thinks of questioning 
the fundamental lie. I give the Warden my im- 
pression of some twenty years' output of the 
phrontisterion — the dull mass of mechanic learn- 
ing, forgotten in a few months after the discharge ; 
the large proportion of feeble wits among the 
scholars ; the half-dozen brilliant minds that have 
won through the press, taken county scholarships 
and attained positions as clerks, like Willy Avery ; 
the spoiled rustics, cheated of their vocation, like 
Joe Mace. There is enough to condemn the 
system in the vicious circle of its ideal : it cannot 
make men and women for the world, but turns 

265 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

the minds which show a little more promise than 
the rest into yet more instruments of its own 
machinery, pupil-teachers, certificated masters and 
mistresses, initiated into the sacred mystery and 
tradition of the status and interests of the teacher. 
And in all the eternal squabble about the educa- 
tional machinery, you will never hear the least 
question raised about the quality of the learning 
it supplies. 

Of course not, the Warden agrees ; that would 
be far too direct, and too near the realities of life. 
We have civilised ourselves altogether out of our 
hold on fundamentals and live fact, and we can 
only fumble with derived and secondary relations. 
It is mostly due, he thinks, to the way in which 
just now all place and power has been secured 
by the clever people, the capable business folk, 
strong heads and thick fingers, who have shoved 
the rare heart-thinkers, the real vivifying geniuses, 
out of practical politics, if they have not got rid 
of the breed altogether. 

We came hereabouts in our discussion to the 
Almshouse gate, and went our several ways. As 
I came home by the field-path, I dreamed of 
impossible conjunctions by which our Joe Maces, 
on their drenched and lonely commons, and the 
topmost powers of the department in their official 
residences could be brought together without any 
intermediate Dempster, and given a sight of each 
other's minds. I think Joe would understand ; 

266 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

as to those public men, I have doubts. At least, 
they would not care, any more than they do for 
any other matter of vital need that is not exploit- 
able to party ends. As they tug at head or feet 
of the body politic to gain the 'ivapa jS^ooroevra, 
they have no time to think whether the soul be 
not already gone out amid the uproar and bloody 
dust. There is, of course, a reckoning for all this : 
in the sudden cool and calm of that vestibule into 
which every fighter steps at last, stands Tisiphone, 
to deal with the strange breed of statesmen who 
turned their hands against each other and fought 
for fighting's sake, while they left untouched not 
only the matters intractable save in a settled state 
of internal peace, but the precise and fatal sum 
of all the true necessities of a state. 



267 



XXIV 

P'ebruary 21. 
I SOMETIMES amuse myself, when I have spare 
time on my hands in the village, or when the 
Warden is not at home, with usurping a place 
among the old men on the southern bench in the 
Almshouse quadrangle, and fancying myself a 
pensioner with the rest, a fellow on the foundation, 
finally berthed in that harbour of ancient peace. 
The gate stands wide all day to invite the world- 
ling; the dark archway of the lodge frames a 
glimpse of lawns, of white pigeons on lichen- 
covered tiles, of weathered buttresses and trefoil- 
headed windows, keen and clear as images in a 
camera obscura. Once within the quadrangle, 
the wanderer finds that he has entered a new 
world : the noises of the street die as in a vacuum ; 
the sundial on the gable tells other hours than those 
measured by the rumbling wheels and clattering 
steps without. Here survives a quality which has 
been expelled from prouder colleges, the secret 
of repose which, so old masters tell us, once dwelt 
in Oxford and Cambridge courts. Here are no 
strident shouts, no twangling banjos, no blazer- 

268 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

clad groups to make discord with the reverend 
walls. The bent figures of the gownsmen sunning 
on the benches or pacing the walks, in academicals 
of that subfusk hue dispensed with under some 
easier statutes, give the last touch to the picture 
of quietude. All is decent, ordered, easeful ; three 
centuries' habit of repose seems to have grown 
upon the very stones of the place. There are 
times when a man may doubt if he could do better, 
some day when the cares of his own small realm 
shall lie heavy on his head, than put on the gown 
and badge, and find ease in some such corner as 
this — " a place " (as Thomas Newcome of Grey 
Friars) " for an old fellow when his career is over 
to hang his sword up, to humble his soul, and 
wait thankfully for the end " — to obey the call 
of morning and evening bells, to tend his garden - 
patch, to feed the pigeons on the grass, to drowse 
under the southern wall in the sun which almost 
seems to stand still over the little haven of used 
force and spent hopes. There are other hours when 
the sanctuary appears too nearly as a hospital, 
perhaps as a prison. The very plan of the narrow 
cloister, the sheltered corners, implies weakness 
and decay ; the iron-sparred windows and the 
porter's punctual keys assert their meaning. A 
few years' acquaintance with the inner economy 
of the foundation will show a man something of 
the real character of the bedesman's life ; he will 
learn how much — or how little — of the outward 

269 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

peace of the house is reflected in the minds of the 
fraternity ; how far he may expect to find among 
the fast changing company any signs of a sense 
of sodality, or of solemnity as at the last stage 
of the journey, with the shadow seldom lifted very 
far from the doors. It seems at times a school 
to which the scholars have come too late. The 
Warden seldom cares to talk of his dealings with 
that indocile second childhood ; one can guess for 
one's self something of jealousies and bickerings 
in the narrow neighbourhood, of fallow grounds 
wherein the roots of old naughtiness stir and shoot 
in a late spring of sheltered leisure. But, the 
Warden says, if he is sometimes ready to despair 
over the old lessons still to learn by the last gleam 
of day, there will be at times a scholar or two 
from whom one knows one has almost everything 
to learn, from whom one may learn, perhaps, to 
mind one's duty in the way of hope. 

I am sufficiently familiar in the house to know 
something of the diverse characters of the inmates. 
The gown by no means makes all equal under its 
iron-grey folds. There is not much in common 
between old Thomas Harding, the senior of the 
house, a farm labourer in his ninetieth year, who, 
with palsied head and knotted rheumatic hands 
clasped over his crutch, dozes out the end of his 
regular, ceaselessly laborious and useful days, and 
George Everest, a little tradesman, corn-chandler 
and wood-dealer, who has reached a harbour at 

270 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

length, after forty years of honestly incapable 
struggles and failures, on whom the new-found 
leisure sometimes hangs with maddening weight. 
It would be hard, again, to find a wider difference 
than that which lies between Eliphaz Puttick, a 
decayed farmer, a man who has held his two 
hundred acres, silent and morose, always brooding 
over that incredible scurvy trick of fortune which 
has brought him here, and John Blaker, the gnome- 
like shrivelled little man, full of restless activity 
and unsuppressible humour, needle-sharp beneath 
an elaborate pose of short-wittedness, whose descent 
to the almshouse from the position of odd man 
and stable-help to Elihu Dean the carrier, is the 
standing joke of one of the merriest lives that ever 
breathed. Such broader differences between man 
and man I can see for myself ; with the help of 
the Warden's hints I can guess at variations in 
individuals, according to time and chance. Some- 
times the husk of decent habit falls off, and old 
devilry awakes, in horrid travesty of young blood. 
Reverend grey heads which nodded over their 
chapel psalms in the morning, spend their exeats 
in an ancient way, and at locking-up time alarm 
the quadrangle with feeble war. In one, he with the 
fine patriarchal head and the courteous manners, a 
little too ready in ordinary with his texts, a little 
too obviously on the side of law and order, the 
smouldering of old vice flickers up under its ashes, 
and the black histories of youth are mixed with 

271 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

the trick of mechanic piety. Sometimes one is 
convinced that the sad old runagates are the sur- 
vivors of a ruder, tougher race than ours. 

At times when I sit on the bench and fancy 
that I feel the gown about my shoulders, I put 
aside the recollection of such shadows of the 
cloister, and think rather of the visible peace and 
order of the place ; of the trim plots which lie 
behind the quad, where the pensioners stoop and 
halt about their garden-rows ; of the Sunday 
holiday, when in state of best blue gowns and 
silver badges the old fellows act the host to 
visitors from the village or the country round, 
sons and daughters, grandchildren, old mates, 
when the quad is alive with the movement of the 
outer world and sounds with unaccustomed chil- 
dren's treble ; of the picture of the chapel benches 
at evensong, when the broken voices repeat the 
Nunc Dimittis, and the quiet and the dusk deep- 
ening on the familiar memorial stones touch per- 
haps even the rudest minds with a finer influence, 
with a sense of the " short remaining watch that 
yet Our senses have to wake." There is a text 
carved beneath the coat-of-arms over the inner 
archway of the gate, the cause of many a puzzled 
construe to strangers as they pass out under it. 
But those who know something of the house and 
its company may find an inner fitness of meaning 
in the founder's paradox, Hahenti dabittir et 
ahundabit. 

272 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

The last time that I took my place on the bench 
and enrolled myself a visionary member of the 
brotherhood was on a mild February day, the first 
truce with winter, the unmistakeable turning point 
of the year. The sunny afternoon had sent most 
of the brethren into the village on their slow- 
footed errands and marketings, and I had the 
seat mainly to myself for an hour or more. The 
sun was warm on the stone, shining through a 
still misty air that softened at once light, colour, 
and sound. The winter sleep was almost over ; 
one more spring was on the way, with the in- 
extricable pleasures and interests of the living 
season. The busy time on the land, the soul- 
steadying routine which balances the world — et 
post malum segetem serendum est — was almost 
due, but not just yet. It was a day for licensed 
idling, when a man might with a clear conscience 
cross his hands behind his head, shut his eyes 
and let the world go by, without the accusation 
even of that vacant susurrus in his ears which as 
a child I used to fancy was the audible pace of 
time. There was just enough of actual sound in 
the air, a mingling of the sparrows' chirp and the 
ruffle of the pigeons' wings with a subdued medley 
of the village noises, to stop that inward ear, and, 
together with the mild light and warmth, to take 
off the minor energies of apprehension and leave 
the centred mind in majestic indolence. But at 
our best we can never idle so serenely and whole- 

2/3 T 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

heartedly as the beasts do. The gnat on the ivy- 
leaf near my head, stroking his forelegs together 
in the bland sunlight ; the pigeons, making believe 
again and again to settle on the tiles, but always 
away in fresh circles high in the pale blue ; the 
midge that crawls across my hand, his tiny flat- 
set wings diamond-bright as ever, but his venom, 
it seems, harmless yet after the winter's chill ; the 
tortoiseshell butterfly come out of his winter 
quarters, one wing smutched of its colour down 
to the grey anatomy, the other snipped by some 
marauding beak, who opens and shuts his ragged 
sails to the sun on the ivy berries : all these take 
the present good with no ill-conditioned inquiry, 
and give praise for the use of the hearth of the 
universe in a way which is the simplest of all, and 
yet usually the last to be achieved, if ever, in 
human thanksgivings. I own my fellowship with 
such poor pensioners as these while we come 
abroad together to greet the broader light, con- 
scious of the sunward-leaning sphere. We are 
almsmen, as much as the grey-coat brethren here 
who creep from their winter fires, their sick-beds 
of customary bronchitis and rheumatics, into the 
blessed warmth for one more term of the good 
days. Even if my faith in the disablement of 
the midge's bite were less active than it is, I 
should let him range at his will over my knuckles ; 
to-day we are too much in accord to think of 
coming to blows. 

274 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

I believe that insufficient attention has on the 
whole been given to certain sets of feelings proper 
to the elderly stages of life. We too commonly 
regard the characteristics of latter middle age as 
only the leavings of youth, results of habit, bye- 
products, if not mere detritus. Of course there 
are virtues to be adjusted, early sentiments to be 
rubbed down to serviceable bluntness by tumbling 
in the world ; but we neglect the finenesses of 
perception, the edges of analytic instinct which 
only begin to get their final polish at about forty, 
the solicitudes from which a man may look back 
with a chill of wonder on the barbaric motions 
of the simpler-minded, sounder-lunged years. Not 
the least among these gifts of Time's attrition I 
should place a change in our relation to the lower 
lives, a hesitation, or something more, as to the 
terms of our suzerainty, a livelier compunction in 
the necessary laying of our clumsy hands on the 
little existences which for ever keep getting in 
our way. For myself, I find the sorrowful warfare 
of the gardener — wasps'-nests and mole-traps, and 
slug-hunts on spring nights — afford more than 
enough to satisfy my sporting instincts. I have 
come to a point where I fail to see the fun of 
killing things. I preach nothing on this head to 
others ; I can remember my own gunning days ; 
I bear about with me the score of my miserable 
little kills. Let Harry Mansel bombard the Sims- 
Bigg pheasants three days a week, and even the 

275 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

Warden have his Saturday at Frogswell now and 
then in the season ; for my choice, I have had 
enough of death already ; I would rather patch up 
and piece out shaky lives to last as many suns 
as they may, and share with all sorts of creatures 
the kindly almshouse benches and south corners 
of the world. To-day I have my own way : here 
we are all once more through the dark and cold, 
facing the new year valiantly, midges and butter- 
flies and pigeons on the sunny roofs, and old 
gownsmen mending nicely from bouts of the time- 
honoured complaints. Up in my own fir trees, 
as the light begins to thicken towards roosting 
time, the pheasants will be kok-kokking lustily, 
safe for another nine months from the rattle of 
the beaters' sticks and the glint on the guns where 
the hazels thin towards the tail of the wood. I 
do not love the bird ; he is a showy, noisy alien, 
always discordant in English woodlands ; yet shall 
the Frogswell coverts be free-warren before I clean 
the rust from my old barrels again. 

Here the Warden came into the quad from the 
entry, and bending his shaggy brows to see who 
was sitting in the sun under the wall, crossed the 
grass and joined me on the bench. He also showed 
in his own way something of the pleasant influences 
of the time. He was relieved to have two or three 
of the old men off the sick-list and managing for 
themselves again. I found, too, that Molly Crofts 
was coming early next month on one of those 

276 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

rejuvenating visits of hers. And there was a sub- 
stratum of very decided satisfaction in his temper 
concerning a review of his in last week's Orh, a 
very irreverent review of a weighty modern philo- 
sopher, which he had hardly fancied any editor 
would print, and which had drawn the philosopher 
like a shot. Under the mild breathings of the 
hour, he was inclined to be patient with the heavy 
thinker whom he really seemed to have upset very 
much, and to be benignly contemptuous towards 
the physiological people and their thumbings of 
the awful complexity of life — awful yet entrancing, 
more and more every day we live, says the Warden. 
He even seemed ready to suffer — I would not say 
gladly, but rather more equably than on other 
occasions — the Biblical critics with that modest 
comparative title, fellows whose taste no one would 
trust to meddle with a line in Euripides. For 
once he shows signs of a mental spring-tide, and 
feels the sphere of thought tilting towards the 
light together with the daedal globe. We are 
getting out of the frozen slush of "science" by 
degrees, he thinks ; when we are tired of splitting 
up the atom we may get back to the real mys- 
teries — such as humour, for instance, and the 
thing we call vulgarity, or the real philosophy 
of history. 

Or beauty, I should have added ; every man has 
his particular province in these neglected fields, 
marked out for himself, if he will but look about 

277 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

him. At any rate I can agree with the Warden 
that if we want work, there is boundless and almost 
untouched matter ready to our hands. 

The Warden presently went in to finish Alms- 
house accounts for the audit ; and when the after- 
noon began to decline, I left the bench and took 
the footpath home. The sun sank to a cloudless 
setting on the hills, and fired the land with a deep 
afterglow. As I came in at the field gate the 
light on the fir trunks was wine-red and rusty 
crimson, and the dark masses of the boughs and 
the brown garden plots loomed in majestic russets 
and purples. A blackbird close to the house sud- 
denly warbled a turn or two of the unforgotten 
song, and a smell of live grass and coltsfoot-leaves 
came on the air. It was one of the hours of 
natural elation ; and when the glorying humour 
takes us, it is good economy to make the most 
of the chance. It is the minor key, after all, which 
is easy and cheap and vulgar — to go back to one 
of the Warden's mysteries. In this genial twilight, 
at the turn of the year, with the better days coming, 
with life still unrolling the inexpressible interest 
of all its depths and subtleties before us, it is not 
very difficult to sound a major scale. The days 
will come again, the days of aches and tempers, 
proper and alien, of east winds temporal and 
spiritual, of outward rubs and an ingrowing soul, 
when the temptation to the sneaking underbred 
minor chord will be sore. The thing to aim at 

2;8 



/ 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

is a workable temper, balanced between the ex- 
tremes, a frame of mind which can keep its counsel 
in the frozen time, and expand frankly at the 
spring. One can wish for such a rational state, 
in which a man can sit about in sunny almshouse 
corners, and often forget the porter's keys ; can 
make room for other people's views, allow the 
Warden's theories or Harry Hansel's aims, or 
sometimes see things as they should be in Molly 
Crofts' eyes ; and can manage on his own account 
to observe with a not unadvised content how life 
burns away, as the ruddy glow kindles evening by 
evening on the fir boughs overhead. 



279 



XXV 

April 1 8. 
" We're going to Rivers Wood to-morrow, to get 
primroses and have tea at the High Beeches ; the 
Warden, and Molly, and Harry Mansel, Lady 
Anne, and the Sims-Bigg girls, and perhaps the 
Yarborough-Greenhalghs. Suppose you take a 
holiday for once and come with us." Thus Mary 
Enderby to me as we met during the morning 
expatiation in the street, on a wonderful April 
day, one of a memorable week, all sun and kindly 
winds, with a soft dripping shower or two at the 
nick of time to keep everything in tune, a spell of 
weather which brought out the leaves and greened 
the meadows all at once, and gave the shining 
street a look of summer. The shops rig out their 
sun-blinds, the cottage gardens are gay with tulips 
and daffodils, the forenoon shopping hour is brave 
with another early blossoming, the outbreak from 
winter coats and hats. There is a roving spirit 
in the air ; people who are content for the rest 
of the year with the length of the village street, 
feel an adventurous motion, and so we hear of 

280 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

long walks and primrose 'gatherings, and tea in 
Rivers Wood. 

There was the least sarcastic inflection in the 
last part of my cousin's invitation. My observa- 
tion, that I am almost the only person in the 
neighbourhood who is not blessed with boundless 
leisure, does not commend itself everywhere as it 
deserves to do. Mary and some others of her sect 
do not consider that, granted certain contentions 
for the sake of argument, one's chains may be all 
the tighter for having been riveted on by one's self. 
Still, I thought that for once I might show her 
that I could get out of bounds if I liked ; besides, 
Rivers Wood is in a way my own preserves, and if 
there was to be any junketing as near my borders 
as that, I would as soon have a hand in it as not. 
So I said I would try and arrange things, and if I 
found I could manage it, I would be at the lower 
heave-gate at three o'clock on the morrow — always 
provided that the weather was still fine. Mary, 
who did not seem to take my acceptance to be so 
conditional as I had made it, gave a half-glance at 
the wrong quarter of the sky and said she was 
sure it was set fair for another week at least ; and 
so left me, and went on to the Almshouse to arrange 
details of supply with Molly Crofts. 

The morrow was fair enough, with a faint veil of 
vapour across the sky, which meant the approaching 
break up of the spell of delicate weather. I was 
at the heave-gate early enough to have to wait a 

281 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

quarter of an hour for the last of the party — Mary 
Enderby and Molly Crofts. We rambled down 
the long rides and took sundry turnings and split 
up into groups, and some of us lost the way, and 
there was calling and answering and reappear- 
ances at corners of the wood-ways to form fresh 
combinations of company ; and I think that most 
of us responded tolerably to the spell of the after- 
noon. A week of April drought brooding warm 
on the wet hollows of the woodland, still stored full 
of the winter's rain, had brought out the flowers in 
a way only seen two or three times in a life. The 
primroses strewed the slopes as though they had 
been flung and shot in armfuls from fairy baskets, 
or as though Flora's apron had slipped and let out 
all her store together ; where they stood a little 
thinner there were drifts and clouds of wind- 
flowers ; violets trailed over the steeper banks, and 
the just-coming hyacinths threw a misty blue over 
their beds of dusk-green leafage. The shadows of 
the saplings lay faint and sharp across the grass of 
the rides, and went on to lose themselves in mazes 
of thin tracery among the dead leaves and twigs, 
the ivy-trails and mosses of the thicket. The air 
was warm and soft, stirring southerly enough to 
bring out all the scents of the wood — the wet earth 
and moss, the keen sweetness of the budding 
larches, above everything else, the infinity of 
primroses. 

Some had brought baskets for flower-picking, 

282 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

and fell to their business about the green shaw ; 
the rest idled through its winding paths, up the 
brows and down the gills, or sat and talked on 
faggots or logs, all making their way sooner or 
later towards the High Beeches, where I had in- 
structed Mrs. Ventom to meet us with kettle and 
crockery from Burntoak, and to have ready the 
elements of tea. In this gradual progress towards 
the rendezvous, at first the men and the women 
sided off by themselves, Sussex fashion ; and 
Harry Mansel and I and the Warden smoked a 
pipe or two under a faggot-stack, and watched the 
ladies at their flower-gathering, nymph-like, far off 
along the shining slopes between the saplings. 
Then, when the baskets were full, we all met and 
paired off at the crossways in the middle of the 
wood, and made towards the great clump of beeches 
two and two. Lady Anne and the Warden led the 
way, and were soon out of sight ; Mary Enderby 
and I presently sat down on a dry bank, and let 
the rest go by us — Harry Mansel with the younger 
Miss Sims-Bigg, and Molly Crofts and Mab 
Yarborough-Greenhalgh arm-in-arm in a young 
ladies' conference, altogether superior to the in- 
sufficiency of cavaliers. 

I dare say, if we had not fallen into that particular 
sorting or shuffling of the party, both my cousin 
and myself might have had something to say about 
the agreeableness of the hour and the place ; but 
when we are in company we seem to have the 

283 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

quality of extinguishing in each other the smallest 
glimmering of sentiment of any kind, and we did 
not audibly admire the view. It was a view which 
certainly might have excused rhapsodies : beyond 
the flower-strewn foreground a gap in the pale 
emerald screen of the larch plantation gave sight 
of the happy valley, the familiar fields and roofs, the 
spire, the ridges of purple woods, and the Downs a 
fess of hyacinthine vapour over it all. The southern 
sky was meshed and threaded with a slowly 
thickening and rising veil, foretelling the rain which 
would come to-morrow to break up prosperously 
the April drought. Overhead a blackbird sang, 
so near us in the larch that we could see the 
motion of his yellow bill as he trolled out his 
richest warble, or listened a moment, head aslant, 
to the other voices of the grove. From the fallow 
on the edge of the plantation came the pipe of a 
plover beating to and fro ; and a stock-dove bore 
a drowsy burden to the rest somewhere deep in the 
hollows of the wood. 

As enthusiasm was barred by that reciprocal 
self-denying ordinance of ours, my cousin and I 
were silent, or talked of common things. We 
even descended so far as into criticism of Gwen- 
dolen Sims-Bigg's hat, its congruity with woodland 
picnics, and whether or no it was to be thought 
that Harry Mansel spent any fraction of the irre- 
coverable hours on the ends of his moustache. It 
occurred to me to ask if I was right in thinking 

284 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

that somehow or other Harry had fallen out of 
Lady Anne's good graces to-day. I said nothing 
about my observation that Mary herself had been 
absolutely truculent to the young man when they 
had come across each other ; for she had carried 
her feud with him for half the summer at least. 
My cousin's expressions are, as a rule, perspicuous 
to a fault ; but her answer on this occasion was, to 
my comprehension, irrelevant and even enigmatical. 
All I could get from her was that Harry's leave was 
up in another fortnight, and if people would be fools, 
they must go their own gate ; and she immediately 
changed the subject, returning in a very critical 
temper to Miss Sims-Bigg's hat and hair, and a 
way I am told she has of looking arch out of the 
corners of her eyes. We presently heard halloos 
from the higher wood, summoning stragglers to tea, 
and when we reached the High Beeches we found 
the rest of the company gathered about the kettle 
singing over a stick fire, tablecloths spread and 
cups ranged, and baskets of Burntoak provision 
lying among the anemones. Mrs. Ventom sur- 
veyed her preparations with an air of tolerant 
allowance for the eccentric folk, who with good 
tea-tables of their own at home must take their 
pleasure in this heathenish way, like so many 
tramps. The tea was not the light-hearted affair 
it should have been : there was a vague sense of 
failure in the air; Lady Anne tvas perceptibly 
holding a temper on the curb ; Molly Crofts did 

285 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

not seem to be herself ; Mary Enderby was almost 
rude to Gwendolen Sims-Bigg, and Harry, on the 
outskirts of the company, seemed to be the victim 
of a solid gloom. Mrs. Ventom waited on us with 
an air of philosophic detachment which suggested 
that she, at any rate, if she liked, could have told 
us what was the matter with the afternoon. 

When tea was done, and we began to make our 
way down towards the road again, I found my 
cousin's humour had not by any means improved. 
She thought if people must pair off two and two, 
like Noah's animals, they might shuffle themselves 
a little now and then. I took the compliment for 
what it was worth, conceiving it to be aimed a 
good way over my head. We could hear confused 
voices here and there, in the wood-walks behind 
us, of people who were evidently in no hurry to 
get to the barway, and as Mary seemed more 
inclined to listen to them than to me, I held my 
tongue and let my thoughts descend to the general 
from the particular. The young people, as far as 
I could judge, had not been so ecstatically happier 
than the elders in the charm of the spring day. 
By all visible signs I had found my account with 
the woods and the weather at a much better rate 
than either Harry Mansel or Molly Crofts, let us 
say. There is often a tragic touch in hours such 
as these, a pang in the very pleasure, for something 
going by, unseizable for mere plenty, like the 
million primroses beyond the capacity of kerchief 

286 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

or basket ; but I doubt if that feeling would pre- 
sent itself definitely enough to these girls and boys 
to affect their natural gaiety. Perhaps it is by 
virtue of our age that we seniors are able to make 
the better bargain, and get more real glorying out 
of the good days. After all, we have learnt to 
take hold less greedily than once we did of the 
things held out to us, and the ultimate refusal is 
less poignant when it comes. Instead of trying to 
fill our hands or our baskets from Time's flower 
posies, we hear him say " Smell how good ! " and 
with hands behind us put our noses with a fair 
show of content to the bunch before it passes. 
Perhaps a man's days have not run altogether 
amiss if they make it practicable in an hour such 
as this to feel the fundamental comedy running 
through the whole play ; and if he have got beyond 
joining in the choric figures, at least to beat time 
to the trochaics from the back benches of the 
theatre. 

I was becoming a little tired of saying nothing, 
and had begun to give utterance to some reflections 
about substance and shadow, eating one's cake and 
having it, when Mary got up from the tree-root we 
had been sitting on, and said it was no good wait- 
ing all day for people who had no idea of time, 
and that we had better get on. We had not taken 
two steps when we heard a laugh behind us, and 
into the clearing at the end of the long ride came 
Harry Mansel and Molly Crofts together. I 

287 



LONEWOOD CORNER 

caught a glimpse of Molly's face, and a momentary 
impression of the two figures hand-in-hand as they 
came down the path, and then my cousin seized 
me by the elbow and jerked me aside into the 
turning of the ride by which we were standing. I 
had followed her indication promptly enough, and 
the hazels were perhaps sufficiently budded to 
make a screen and hide us, if the two had had eyes 
to look our way. 

" Come on, and let us get out of this," said Mary, 
in a whisper of the tensest energy. " They won't 
want us bothering about here." So after standing 
and holding our breath like conspirators behind 
our covert, we presently made our way to the bar- 
way by roundabout and unlikely paths. We found 
that we were behind all the rest, and so walked 
down to the village by ourselves. My cousin was 
rather absent-minded, and quite uncivilly taciturn ; 
but when we said good night at the head of the 
street, while the twilight flushed a dull rose from 
the afterglow, there was a look in her face such as 
I remembered had shone on an evening like this a 
year ago, a reflection, I think, of the light which 
we had seen for a moment in Molly's eyes. 



THE END 



PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES. 



GT 10 W'^: 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: June 2009 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATION 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724) 779-2111 



f^SKNTANO'8 
««Uen tc Stationer*, 
shiogton. D. C. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




014 432 976 4 



